Poetry Quote by Jim Carroll — Inspiring Words on Life, Love & Wisdom

“all right”

“Poetry can unleash a terrible fear. I suppose it is the fear of possibilities, too many possibilities, each with its own endless set of variations. It's like looking too closely and too long into a mirror; soon your features distort, then erupt. You look too closely into your poems, or listen too closely to them as they arrive in whispers, and the features inside you - call it heart, call it mind, call it soul - accelerate out of control. They distort and they erupt, and it is one strange pain. You realize, then, that you can't attempt breaking down too many barriers in too short a time, because there are as many horrors waiting to get in at you as there are parts of yourself pushing to break out, and with the same, or more, fevered determination.”

“I'll Die For Your Sins If You Live For mine.”

“Poetry is prose in slow motion.”

“Reclaiming the sacred in our lives naturally brings us close once more to the wellsprings of poetry.”

“Poetry is the language of intensity. Because we are going to die, an expression of intensity is justified.”

“I have been right, Basil, haven’t I, to take my love out of poetry, and to find my wife in Shakespeare’s plays? Lips that Shakespeare taught to speak have whispered their secret in my ear. I have had the arms of Rosalind around me, and kissed Juliet on the mouth.”

“It is not what they built. It is what they knocked down.”

“As the future ripens in the past,”