There's something to be said in favor of working in isolation in the real world.

I must stress here the point that I appreciate clarity, order, meaning, structure, rationality: they are necessary to whatever provisional stability we have, and they can be the agents of gradual and successful change.

Even if you walk exactly the same route each time - as with a sonnet - the events along the route cannot be imagined to be the same from day to day, as the poet's health, sight, his anticipations, moods, fears, thoughts cannot be the same.

If the greatest god is the stillness all the motions add up to, then we must ineluctably be included.

Besides the actual reading in class of many poems, I would suggest you do two things: first, while teaching everything you can and keeping free of it, teach that poetry is a mode of discourse that differs from logical exposition.

If we ask a vague question, such as, 'What is poetry?' we expect a vague answer, such as, 'Poetry is the music of words,' or 'Poetry is the linguistic correction of disorder.'

In nature there are few sharp lines.

That's a wonderful change that's taken place, and so most poetry today is published, if not directly by the person, certainly by the enterprise of the poet himself, working with his friends.

You have your identity when you find out, not what you can keep your mind on, but what you can't keep your mind off.

Questions structure and, so, to some extent predetermine answers.

Once every five hundred years or so, a summary statement about poetry comes along that we can't imagine ourselves living without.

There's something to be said in favor of working in isolation in the real world.

The poet exposes himself to the risk. All that has been said about poetry, all that he has learned about poetry, is only a partial assurance.

I am grateful for - though I can't keep up with - the flood of articles, theses, and textbooks that mean to share insight concerning the nature of poetry.

Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.

I can't tell you where a poem comes from, what it is, or what it is for: nor can any other man. The reason I can't tell you is that the purpose of a poem is to go past telling, to be recognised by burning.

If a poem is each time new, then it is necessarily an act of discovery, a chance taken, a chance that may lead to fulfillment or disaster.

Is it not careless to become too local when there are four hundred billion stars in our galaxy alone.

Poetry leads us to the unstructured sources of our beings, to the unknown, and returns us to our rational, structured selves refreshed.

Anything looked at closely becomes wonderful.

Each poem in becoming generates the laws by which it is generated: extensions of the laws to other poems never completely take.

Probably all the attention to poetry results in some value, though the attention is more often directed to lesser than to greater values.

For though we often need to be restored to the small, concrete, limited, and certain, we as often need to be reminded of the large, vague, unlimited, unknown.

A poem generated by its own laws may be unrealized and bad in terms of so-called objective principles of taste, judgement, deduction.

I take the walk to be the externalization of an interior seeking so that the analogy is first of all between the external and the internal.

Everything is discursive opinion instead of direct experience.

Only silence perfects silence.

You're going through the horror of it, you're going through the isolation of it but you're being empowered by reminding yourself that you're connected to everybody else.

Solitude vivifies; isolation kills.

There's a real purity in New Zealand that doesn't exist in the states. It's actually not an easy thing to find in our world anymore. It's a unique place because it is so far away from the rest of the world. There is a sense of isolation and also being protected.

I rent houses in LA when I'm filming. I find the isolation there terrifying. There's nowhere to go, there's nowhere to be with people. I'm not a beach bunny.

My habit of glorifying things far away in space and time, also contributed to my social isolation.

There is no such thing as a good or bad ad in isolation. What is good at one moment is bad at another. Research can trap you into the past.

Isolation is a dream killer.

Isolation is a self-defeating dream.

Earth's dispossessed are vulnerable targets for extremists: those who teach that global justice is meaningless; that satisfaction can come only in violence, division, and intellectual isolation.

The one happiness is to shut one's door upon a little room, with a table before one, and to create; to create life in that isolation from life.

Tasmanian history is a study of human isolation unprecedented except in science fiction - namely, complete isolation from other humans for 10,000 years.

The geographical isolation and lack of television made world happenings and problems seem remote.

People can undergo a sudden change of thinking and loyalties under threat of death or intense social pressure and isolation from friends and family.

One of the biggest changes that ever occurred in my life was going from the isolation of working part-time as a house painter in Henderson County, to Cornell, where everybody was a literary person.

The home stands in contrast to all other capitalist institutions as the last stronghold of pre-capitalist isolation.

There is no way that writers can be tamed and rendered civilized or even cured. The only solution known to science is to provide the patient with an isolation room, where he can endure the acute stages in private and where food can be poked in to him with a stick.

If isolation tempers the strong, it is the stumbling-block of the uncertain.

There's something to be said in favor of working in isolation in the real world.

And with each day that passed, the gulf broadened and my isolation became more accentuated. In such a situation, the discovery that my experience was not unique, that it had also been that of other Spanish intellectuals, became very important for me.

Isolation is the sum total of wretchedness to a man.

National isolation breeds national neurosis.

I think isolation is one of the greatest problems, an ever-growing obstacle to political solidarity.