Be With Me In The Phases Of My Work Because My Brain Feels Like It Has Been Whipped And I Yearn To Make A Small Perfect Thing Which Will Live In Your Morning Like Curious Static Through A President's Elegy Or A Nude Hunchback Acquiring A Tan On The Crowded Oily Beach.
SIT IN A CHAIR AND KEEP still. Let the dancer's shoulders emerge from your shoulders, the dancer's chest from your chest, the dancer's loins from your loins, the dancer's hips and thighs from yours; and from your silence the throat that makes a sound, and from your bafflement a clear song to which the dancer moves, and let him serve God in beauty.
I don't really understand that process called reincarnation but if there is such a thing I'd like to come back as my daughter's dog.
Friend, when you speak this carefully I know it is because you don't know what to say.
A woman watches her body uneasily, as though it were an unreliable ally in the battle for love.
It's hard to hold the hand of anyone who is reaching for the sky just to surrender.
I had girlfriends who really irritated me by their devotion to the Beatles. I didn't begrudge them their interest, and there were songs like 'Hey Jude' that I could appreciate. But they didn't seem to be essential to the kind of nourishment that I craved.
Some people care about their work lasting forever - I have little interest in it.
There were times that I thought I was good looking.
My mind was always very cluttered, so I took great pains to simplify my environment, because if my environment were half as cluttered as my mind, I wouldn't be able to make it from room to room.
All the Men will be sailors then, until the sea shall free them.
I DRAW ASIDE THE CURTAIN. You mock us with the beauty of your world.
We did no train ourselves to receive, because we believed there wasn't anything to receive and we could not endure with this belief.
Prayer is translation. A man translates himself into a child asking for all there is in a language he has barely mastered.
We are not mad. We are human.We want to love, and someone must forgive us for the paths we take to love, for the paths are many and dark, and we are ardent and cruel in our journey.
And most people have a woman in their heart, most men have a woman in their heart and most women have a man in their heart.
There's a crack in everything, it's how the light gets in.
You live your life as if it's real.......a thousand kisses deep.
Listen to the one who has not been wounded, the one who says, 'It is not good that man should be alone.' Recall your longing to the loneliness where it was born, so that when she appears, she will stand before you, not against you. Refine your longing here, in the small silver music of her preparations, under the low-built shelter of repentance.
A young nurse is standing close behind me wondering whether she is being drawn by my power or her charity.
Love is a fire/It burns everyone/It disfigures everyone/It is the world's excuse for being ugly.
It's like a bear stumbling into a beehive or a honey cache: I'm stumbling right into it and getting stuck, and it's delicious and it's horrible and I'm in it and it's not very graceful and it's very awkward and it's very painful and yet there's something inevitable about it.
Blessed is your name. Blessed is the confession of your name.
And everything depends upon how near you sleep to me.
To every people the land is given on condition. Perceived or not, there is a Covenant, beyond the constitution, beyond sovereign guarantee, beyond the nation's sweetest dreams of itself.
I can work on a verse for a very long time before realising it's not any good and then, and only then, can I discard it.
Ah, grief makes us precise!
My sense of proprietorship has been so weak that actually I didn't pay attention and I lost the copyrights on a lot of the songs.
Establish your law in this walled place. Let nine men come to lift me into their prayer so that I may whisper with them: Blessed be the name of the glory of the kingdom forever and forever.
Let judges secretly despair of justice: their verdicts will be more acute. Let generals secretly despair of triumph; killing will be defamed. Let priests secretly despair of faith: their compassion will be true.
There is a war between the ones who say there is a war and the ones who say there isn't.
Your body will never be familiar.
I speak of a clinical depression that is the background of your entire life, a background of anguish and anxiety, a sense that nothing goes well, that pleasure is unavailable and all your strategies collapse.
I didn't want to write for pay. I wanted to be paid for what I write.
I think that Bob Dylan knows this more than all of us: you don't write the songs anyhow. So if you're lucky, you can keep the vehicle healthy and responsive over the years. If you're lucky, your own intentions have very little to do with this.
There's a blaze of light in every word. It doesn't matter which you heard. The holy or the broken hallelujah.
If I knew where the good songs came from, I'd go there more often.
It is easy to display a wound, the proud scars of combat. It is hard to show a pimple.
I cannot understand why my arm is not a lilac tree.
It's a pity if someone… has to console himself for the wreck of his days with the notion that somehow his voice, his work embodies the deepest, most obscure, freshest, rawest oyster of reality in the unfathomable refrigerator of the heart's ocean, but I am such a one, and there you have it.
I never really liked poetry readings; I liked to read poetry by myself, but I liked singing, chanting my lyrics to this jazz group.
The silver knives are flashing in that tired old cafe...
As a young man, Yeats spoke to me in a way I could understand. Shakespeare I couldn't understand, but Yeats I could. It was his subject matter and also I really admired the way he put his personal life on the line.
My reputation as a ladies' man was a joke. It caused me to laugh bitterly through the 10,000 nights I spent alone.
As our eyes grow accustomed to sight they armour themselves against wonder.
I never had huge amounts of money when I was young. I had huge amounts of fame, and I always had the sense of labor and recompense. I always said I don't want to work for pay, but I want to get paid for my song.
After a while, if you are sufficiently bored or unemployed, you may want to read it from cover to cover.
There are some people who come to me for some illumination on their problems. I guess they feel I'm writing about some of the things they themselves are going through. But I don't usually have much help to give - there isn't much you can say to someone in the midst of their own crises.
As I approach the end of my life, I have even less and less interest in examining what have got to be very superficial evaluations or opinions about the significance of one's life or one's work. I was never given to it when I was healthy, and I am less given to it now.
