Quotes by E. E. Cummings

The voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses.

I carry your heart with me (I carry it in my heart).

Love is the whole and more than all.

Great men burn bridges before they come to them.

Lovers alone wear sunlight.

Trust your heart if the seas catch fire, live by love though the stars walk backward.

Unless you love someone, nothing else makes any sense.

Be of love a little more careful than of anything.

Kisses are a better fate than wisdom.

It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.

The world is mud-luscious and puddle wonderful.

It takes courage to grow up and turn out to be who you really are.

To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best day and night to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting.

Once we believe in ourselves, we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight, or any experiences that reveals the human spirit.

Hatred bounces.

Yours is the light by which my spirit's born: yours is the darkness of my soul's return --you are my sun, my moon, and all my stars.

It takes a lot of courage to grow up and become who you really are.

To be nobody but yourself in a word which is working night and day to make you like everybody else means to fight the hardest battle any human being can fight and never stop fighting.

To be nobody but yourself in a world doing its best to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle any human can ever fight and never stop fighting.

To be nobody but yourself in a world that's doing its best to make you somebody else, is to fight the hardest battle you are ever going to fight. Never stop fighting.

For whatever we lose (like a you or a me), it's always our self we find in the sea.

I thank you God for this most amazing day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees, and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything which is natural, which is infinite, which is yes.

Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight, or any experience that reveals the human spirit.

The hardest challenge is to be yourself in a world where everyone is trying to make you be someone else.

I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing than teach 10,000 stars how not to dance.

Since the thing perhaps is
to eat flowers and not to be afraid.

Love is a deeper season
than reason;
my sweet one.

The Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls are unbeautiful and have comfortable minds.

The moon rattles like a fragment of angry candy.

Love is a place and through this place of love move (with brightness of peace) all places yes is a world and in this world of yes live (skillfully curled) all worlds.

That strictly(and how)scienti fic land of supernod where freedom is compulsory and only man is god.

Damn everything but the circus!...The average 'painter' 'sculptor' 'poet' 'composer' 'playwright' is a person who cannot leap through a hoop from the back of a galloping horse, make people laugh with a clown's mouth, orchestrate twenty lions.

One's not half of two; two are halves of one.

There is no music unless the drum and the drummer are one.

The theory of the free press is not that the truth will be presented completely or perfectly in any one instance, but that the truth will emerge from free discussion.

Your homecoming will be my homecoming.

Unlove's the heavenless hell and the homeless home.

Notice the convulsed orange inch of moon perching on this silver minute of evening.

A pretty girl, who naked is
is worth a million statues.

Guilt is the cause of more marauders than history's most obscene disauders.

A poet is someone who is abnormally fond of that precision which creates movement. Which is to say the highest form of concentration possible: fascination; to report on the electrifying experience of being.

When man determined to destroy
himself he picked the was
of shall and finding only why
smashed it into because.

Giving to steal and cruel kind,

a heart to fear, to doubt a mind,

to differ a disease of same,

conform the pinnacle of am

though dull were all we taste as bright,

bitter all utterly things sweet,

maggoty minus and dumb death

all we inherit, all bequeath.

More each particular person is(my love) alive than every world can understand and now you are and i am now and we're a mystery that will never happen again, a miracle which has never happened before and shining this our now must come to then.

It's no use trying to pretend that most people and ourselves are alike. Most people have less in common with ourselves than the square root of minus one. You and I are human beings; most people are snobs.

The poems to come are for you and for me and are not for most people... you and i are human beings; most people are snobs.

Since feelings come first, who cares about the syntax of things?

(existing's tricky:but to live's a gift).

(and from my thighs which shrug and pant a murdering rain leapingly reaches the upward singular deepest flower which she carries in a gesture of her hips).

The first step to expanding your reality is to discard the tendency to exclude things from possibility.

-tomorrow is our permanent address

and there they'll scarcely find us(if they do,
we'll move away still further:into now.

What if a much of a which of a wind

gives the truth to summer's lie;

bloodies with dizzying leaves the sun

and yanks immortal stars awry?

The sensual mysticism of entire vertical being.

Why according to tomorrow's paper the proletariat will not rise yesterday.

Love is a place
andamp; through this place of
love move
(with brightness of peace)
all places

yes is a world
andamp; in this world of yes live
(skillfully curled)
all worlds.

What time is it? It is by every star a different time, and each most falsely true.

One day anyone died i guess

(and noone stooped to kiss his face)

busy folk buried them side by side

little by little and was by was.

Like the burlesque comedian, I am abnormally fond of that precision which creates movement.

Things which in my mind blossom will stumble beneath a clumsiest disguise appear capable of fragility and indecision.

I think you will be tired of telling
me and my dreams to go to hell.

-tomorrow is our permanent address and there they'll scarcely find us(if they do, we'll move away still further:into now.

What concerns me fundamentaly is a meteoric burlesk melodrama, born of the immemorial adage love will find a way.

The three saddest things are the ill wanting to be well, the poor wanting to be rich, and the constant traveler saying 'anywhere but here'.

Hopes dance best on bald men's hair.

I am an i poet.

I will take the sun in my mouth and leap into the ripe air Alive with closed eyes to dash against darkness.

I'd rather have two good friends, than 500,000 admirers.

My

mother hoped that

i would die etcetera

bravely of course my father used

to become hoarse talking about how it was

a privilege and if only he

could.

If at the end of your first ten or fifteen years of fighting and working and feeling, you find you've written one line of one poem, you'll be very lucky indeed.

On forever's very now we stand.

All in green went my love of riding on a great horse of gold into the silver dawn.

I shall imagine life is not worth dying,if (and when)roses complain their beauties are in vain but though mankind persuades itself that every weed's a rose,roses(you feel certain)will only smile.

I love you much most beautiful darling more than anyone on the earth and I like you better than everything in the sky.

Who pays any attention to the syntax of things will never wholly kiss you.

Life's not a paragraph And death i think is no parenthesis.

It's spring when the world is puddle-wonderful.

Humanity i love you because you are perpetually putting the secret of life in your pants and forgetting it's there and sitting down on it and because you are forever making poems in the lap of death Humanity i hate you.

The hardest challenge is to be yourself in a world where everyone is trying to make you be somebody else.

What if a dawn of a doom of a dream bites this universe in two, peels forever out of his grave, and sprinkles nowhere with me and you?

I do not know what it is about you that closes and opens;only something in me understands the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses.

Nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals the power of your intense fragility.

I spill my bright incalculable soul.

Anyone lived in a pretty how town

(with up so floating many bells down)

spring summer autumn winter

he sang his didn't he danced his did.

Women and men(both little and small)

cared for anyone not at all

they sowed their isn't they reaped their same

sun moon stars rain.

You are my sun, my moon, and all my stars.

Such was a poet and shall be and is -who'll solve the depths of horror to defend a sunbeam's architecture with his life: and carve immortal jungles of despair to hold a mountain's heartbeat in his hand.

Well, write poetry, for God's sake, it's the only thing that matters.

Seeker of truth follow no path all paths lead where truth is here.

Tumbling-hair picker of buttercups violets dandelions And the big bullying daisies through the field wonderful with eyes a little sorry Another comes also picking flowers.

I fear no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true) and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant and whatever a sun will always sing is you here is the deepest secret nobody knows.

And it's you are whatever a moon has always meant and whatever a sun will always sing is you.

Really unreal world, will you perhaps do the breathing for me while I am away?

If 180 million people want to be undead, that's their funeral, but I happen to like being alive.

Sweet springtime is my time is your time is our time for springtime is love time and viva sweet love.

And still the mad magnificent herald Spring assembles beauty from forgetfulness with the wild trump of April:witchery of sound and odour drives the wingless thing man forth in the bright air.

The whole truth... sings only -- and all lovers are the song.

The symbol of all art is the Prism. The goal is unrealism. The method is destructive. To break up the white light of objective realism, into the secret glories which it contains.

And this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart I carry your heart i carry it in my heart.

And the coolness of your smile is stirringofbirds between my arms.

Meanwhile myself et cetera lay quietly in the deep mud et cetera (dreaming, et cetera, of your smile eyes knees and of your Etcetera.).

An intelligent person fights for lost causes, realizing that others are merely effects.

Because it's Spring thingS dare to do people (andamp; not the other way round)because it 's A pril Lives lead their own persons(in stead of everybodyelse's)but what's wholly marvellous my Darling is that you and i are more than you and i(be ca us e It's we).

Suppose Life is an old man carrying flowers on his head.

Lessons hide in his wrinkles. Bells ding in the oldness of eyes. Did he by, any chance, tell children that there are such monstrous things as peace and goodwill...a corrupter of youth no doubt.

Your slightest look easily will unclose me, though I have closed myself as fingers, you open petal by petal myself a Spring opens her first rose.

Miracles are to come. With you I leave a remembrance of miracles: they are by somebody who can love and who shall be continually reborn, a human being.

A man who had fallen among thieves lay by the roadside on his back dressed in fifteenthrate ideas wearing a round jeer for a hat.

O sweet spontaneous earth how often has the naughty thumb of science prodded thy beauty thou answereth them only with spring.

A salesman is an it that stinks to please but whether to please itself or someone else makes no more difference than if it sells hate condoms education snakeoil vac uumcleaners terror strawberries democ ra(caveat emptor)cy superfluous hair.

What's beyond logic happens beneath will;
nor can these moments be translated: i say
that even after April
by God there is no excuse for May.

How should tasting touching hearing seeing breathing any lifted from the no of all nothing human merely being doubt unimaginable You?

The Artist is no other than he who unlearns what he has learned, in order to know himself.

The mind is its own beautiful prisoner. Mind looked long at the sticky moon opening in dusk her new wings then decently hanged himself,one afternoon. The last thing he saw was you naked amid unnaked things.

Someone asked me what home was and all I could think of were the stars on the tip of your tongue, the flowers sprouting from your mouth, the roots entwined in the gaps between your fingers, the ocean echoing inside of your ribcage.

Nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands.

Life's not a paragraph
And death i think is no parenthesis.

Listen: there's a hell
of a good universe next door; let's go.

All in green went my love riding.

Peering from some high window; at the gold of November sunset

(and feeling that if day has to become night this is a beautiful way).

To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else -- means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

His lips drink water
but his heart drinks wine.

-Before leaving my room i turn, and (stooping through the morning) kiss this pillow, dear where our heads lived and were.

For whatever we lose (like a you or a me), It's always our self we find in the sea.

Your head is a living forest full of songbirds.

May my heart always be open to little birds who are the secrets of living.

May my mind stroll about hungry and fearless and thirsty and supple and even if its sunday may i be wrong for whenever men are right they are not young.

All by all and deep by deep and more by more they dream their sleep noone and anyone earth by april wish by spirit and if by yes.

For surely as each November has its April, mysteries only are significant; and one mystery-of-mysteries creates them all: nothing false and possible is love (who's imagined,therefore limitless) love's to giving as to keeping's give; as yes is to if,love is to yes.

The sweet small clumsy feet of april came into the ragged meadow of my soul.

Mr youse needn't be so spry concernin questions arty each has his tastes but as for i i likes a certain party gimme the he-man's solid bliss for youse ideas i'll match youse a pretty girl who naked is is worth a million statues.

Buffalo Bill's defunct who used to ride a watersmooth-silver stallion and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat Jesus he was a handsome man and what i want to know is how do you like your blueeyed boy Mister Death.

Buffalo Bill's

defunct.

I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing than to teach ten thousand stars how not to dance.

Yours is the light by which my spirit's born: -- you are my sun, my moon, and all my stars.

It is with roses and locomotives (not to mention acrobats Spring electricity Coney Island the 4th of July the eyes of mice and Niagara Falls) that my poems are competing.

So, when kiss Spring comes

we'll kiss each kiss other on kiss the kiss

lips because tic clocks tock don't make

a toctic difference

to kisskiss you and to

kiss me.

Awake,chaos:we have napped.

I remember we all cried like the Missouri when my Uncle Sol's coffin lurched because somebody pressed a button (and down went my uncle Sol and started a worm farm).

To be nobody-but-yourself -- in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else -- means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

And now you are and I am and we're a mystery which will never happen again.

May came home with a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone.

Losing through you what seemed myself, i find selves unimaginably mine; beyond sorrow's own joys and hopings very fears yours is the light by which my spirit's born: yours is the darkness of my soul's return... you are my sun, my moon, and all my stars.

Lady through whose profound and fragile lips
the sweet small clumsy feet of April came

into the ragged meadow of my soul.

Always it's Spring)and everyone's in love and flowers pick themselves.

In just -- Spring when the world is mud- luscious the little lame balloonman whistles far and wee.

The snow doesn't give a soft white damn whom it touches.

Always it's Spring and everyone's in love and flowers pick themselves.

Love is the voice under all silences, the hope which has no opposite in fear.

Love is the voice under all silences, the hope which has no opposite in fear; the strength so strong mere force is feebleness: the truth more first than sun, more last than star.

I'm living so far beyond my income that we may almost be said to be living apart.

I would rather learn from one bird how to sing than to teach 10,000 stars how not to dance.

To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

America makes prodigious mistakes, America has colossal faults, but one thing cannot be denied: America is always on the move. She may be going to Hell, of course, but at least she isn't standing still.

I like my body when it is with your body. It is so quite new a thing. Muscles better and nerves more.

Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question.

Knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination.

At least the Pilgrim Fathers used to shoot Indians: the Pilgrim Children merely punch time clocks.

Humanity I love you because when you're hard up you pawn your intelligence to buy a drink.

Unbeing dead isn't being alive.

To destroy is always the first step in any creation.

To like an individual because he's black is just as insulting as to dislike him because he isn't white.

Listen; there's a hell of a good universe next door: let's go.

It takes three to make a child.

The world is mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful.

I imagine that yes is the only living thing.

A politician is an arse upon which everyone has sat except a man.

I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance.

If a poet is anybody, he is somebody to whom things made matter very little -- somebody who is obsessed by Making.

Private property began the instant somebody had a mind of his own.

Nothing recedes like progress.

The most wasted of all days is one without laughter.