Kay Ryan quotes:

Tenderness and RotTenderness and rotshare a border.And rot is anaggressive neighborwhose iridescencekeeps creeping over.No lessonscan be drawnfrom this however.One is nottwo countries.One is not meatcorrupting.It is importantto stay sweetand loving.

I simply want to celebrate the fact that right near your home, year in and year out, a community college is quietly â?? and with very little financial encouragement â?? saving lives and minds. I canâ??t think of a more efficient, hopeful or egalitarian machine, expect perhaps the bicycle.

Small presses take chances. Chances are at the heart of all the literature we later know as great.

A too closely watched flower/blossoms the wrong color./Excess attention to the jonquil/turns it gentian. Flowers/need it tranquil to get/their hues right. Some/only open at midnight.

Failure: the renewable resource.

I don't think any poetry is written that isn't primarily written to the self, in a way... I'm always talking to myself. But I seem to want somebody else to listen to it. I need, I do want an audience. So it's a strange thing. It's a very private conversation that then, you make public, kind of like the starfish flipping its stomach out.

The satisfactions/of agreement are/immediate as sugar--/a melting of the/granular, a syrup/that lingers, shared/not singular./Many prefer it.

Action creates/a taste/for itself.

Forgetting takes space./Forgotten matters displace/as much anything else as/anything else. We must/skirt unlabeled crates/as thought it made sense/and take them when we go/to other states.

Gaps don't/just happen./There is a/generative element/inside them,/a welling motion/ as when cold/waters shoulder/up through/warmer oceans./And where gaps/choose to widen,/coordinates warp,/even in places/constant since/the oldest maps.

The only real access that I have to my mind is when I'm writing.

The day misspent, the love misplaced, has inside it the seed of redemption. Nothing is exempt from resurrection.

What keeps me writing is that I can only know through writing. My major sense organ is apparently a pencil.

BAIT GOAT There is a distance where magnets pull, we feel, having held them back. Likewise there is a distance where words attract. Set one out like a bait goat and wait and seven others will approach. But watch out: roving packs can pull your word away. You find your stake yanked and some rough bunch to thank.

The Self Is Not PortableThe self is notportable. Itcannot be packed.It comes sneakingback to any placefrom which it'sbeen extracted,for it is nothing alone.It is not an entity.The ratio of selfto home: one partin seventy.

One can't work/by limelight.//A bowlful/right at/one's elbow//produces no/more than/a baleful/glow against/the kitchen table.//The fruit purveyor's/whole unstable/pyramid//doesn't equal/what daylight did.

In the hills giant oaksFall upon their kneesYou can touch parts You have no right to

A lot of the job that one has to do as a writer is to protect the thing that doesn't match the world.

As for reality, I don't even have any interest in that word.

I have tried to live very quietly, so I could be happy.

If we have not struggled/as hard as we can/at our strongest/how will we sense/the shape of our losses/or know what sustains/us longest or name/what change costs us,/saying how strange/it is that one sector/of the self can step in/for another in trouble,/how loss activates/a latent double, how/we can feed/as upon nectar/upon need?

It isn't ever delicate to live.

It's important to have your private enjoyments because sometimes that's all we have.

Who would have guessed it possible that waiting is sustainable. A place with its own harvest.