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

“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.”

“Conscience is no more than the dead speaking to us.”

“all right”

“Morning and evening”

“It is at the edge of the”

“so much of the world is plunged in darkness and chaos...”

“Not everything can be felt and not everything will be ever understood.”

“We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but out of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.”

“Places We Love”