Richard Wilbur Quotes

• Outside the open window The morning air is all awash with angels.

  Richard Wilbur

  Inspirational, Morning, Angel

  1956 Things of This World, 'Love Calls Us to the Things of This World'.

  50 Copy quote

• Step off assuredly into the blank of your mind. Something will come to you.

  Richard Wilbur

  Mind, Crafts, Steps

  Richard Wilbur, William Butts (1990). “Conversations with Richard Wilbur”, p.109, Univ. Press of Mississippi

  10 Copy quote

• The strength of the genie comes from being in a bottle.

  Richard Wilbur

  Inspirational, Inspiration, Bottles

  11 Copy quote

• Teach me, like you, to drink creation whole/ And casting out myself, become a soul.

  Richard Wilbur

  Soul, Casting, Like You

  Richard Wilbur (2006). “Collected Poems 1943-2004”, p.281, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  12 Copy quote

• All that we do is touched with ocean, and yet we remain on the shore of what we know

  Richard Wilbur

  Ocean, Shore, Knows

  Richard Wilbur (2006). “Collected Poems 1943-2004”, p.211, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  13 Copy quote

• Writing is?waiting for the word that may not be there until next Tuesday.

  Richard Wilbur

  Writing, Tuesday, Waiting

  1987 In the Los Angeles Times,13 Oct.

  7 Copy quote

• I would feel dead if I didn't have the ability periodically to put my world in order with a poem. I think to be inarticulate is a great suffering, and is especially so to anyone who has a certain knack for poetry.

  Richard Wilbur

  Thinking, Order, Suffering

  16 Copy quote

• What is the opposite of two? A lonely me, a lonely you.

  Richard Wilbur

  Break Up, I Miss You, Broken Heart

  Richard Wilbur (2006). “Opposites, More Opposites, and a Few Differences”, p.12, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  45 Copy quote

• The eye is pleased when nature stoops to art.

  Richard Wilbur

  Art, Nature, Eye

  Richard Wilbur (2004). “Collected Poems, 1943-2004”, p.395, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  12 Copy quote

• Most women know that sex isgood for headaches.

  Richard Wilbur

  Sex, Headache, Knows

  14 Copy quote

• Writing poetry is talking to oneself; yet it is a mode of talking to oneself in which the self disappears; and the product's something that, though it may not be for everybody, is about everybody.

  Richard Wilbur

  Writing, Self, Talking

  "Richard Wilbur, Winner of the 1957 Poetry Award for Things of This World". Acceptance Speech, www.nationalbook.org. 1957.

  4 Copy quote

• Odd that a thing is most itself when likened

  Richard Wilbur

  Odd

  Richard Wilbur (2006). “Collected Poems 1943-2004”, p.84, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  7 Copy quote

• There is a poignancy in all things clear, In the stare of the deer, in the ring of a hammer in the morning. Seeing a bucket of perfectly lucid water We fall to imagining prodigious honesties.

  Richard Wilbur

  Morning, Honesty, Fall

  Richard Wilbur (2006). “Collected Poems 1943-2004”, p.385, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  11 Copy quote

• Whatever pains disease may bring Are but the tangy seasoning To Loves delicious fare.

  Richard Wilbur

  Love, Pain, May

  Richard Wilbur (2012). “Poems of Richard Wilbur”, p.51, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  8 Copy quote

• Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,
  Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam
  And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.

  Richard Wilbur

  Sight, Hands, Heaven

  Richard Wilbur (2012). “Poems of Richard Wilbur”, p.72, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  7 Copy quote

• What's lightly hid is deepest understood.

  Richard Wilbur

  Understood

  Richard Wilbur (2012). “Poems of Richard Wilbur”, p.174, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  4 Copy quote

• We know what boredom is: it is a dull
  Impatience or a fierce velleity,
  A champing wish, stalled by our lassitude,
  To make or do. In the strict sense, of course,
  We invent nothing, merely bearing witness
  To what each morning brings again to light

  Richard Wilbur

  Morning, Light, Boredom

  Richard Wilbur (2006). “Collected Poems 1943-2004”, p.83, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  12 Copy quote

• It is true that the poet does not directly address his neighbors; but he does address a great congress of persons who dwell at the back of his mind, a congress of all those who have taught him and whom he has admired; they constitute his ideal audience and his better self.

  Richard Wilbur

  Self, Mind, Doe

  Richard Wilbur's National Book Award Acceptance Speech for the poetry award for "Things of This World", www.nationalbook.org. 1957.

  9 Copy quote

• Try to remember this: what you project Is what you will perceive; what you perceive With any passion, be it love or terror, May take on whims and powers of its own. Therefore a numb and grudging circumspection Will serve you best - unless you overdo it, Watching your step too narrowly, refusing To specify a world, shrinking your purview To a tight vision of your inching shoes, Which may, as soon as you come to think, be crossing An unseen gorge upon a rotten trestle.

  Richard Wilbur

  Passion, Thinking, Shoes

  Richard Wilbur (2006). “Collected Poems 1943-2004”, p.235, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  4 Copy quote

• Composition for me is, externally at least, scarcely distinguishable from catatonia.

  Richard Wilbur

  Composition

  Richard Wilbur, William Butts (1990). “Conversations with Richard Wilbur”, p.180, Univ. Press of Mississippi

  5 Copy quote

• Happy in all that ragged, loose collapse of water, the fountain, its effortless descent and flatteries of spray.

  Richard Wilbur

  Rain, Rivers, Water

  Richard Wilbur, “A Baroque Wall-Fountain in the VILLa Sciarra”

  7 Copy quote

• What is our praise or pride but to imagine excellence and try to make it? What does it say over the door of heaven; but, homo (sapiens) fecit?

  Richard Wilbur

  Pride, Doors, Heaven

  7 Copy quote

• Columbus and his men, they say, Conveyed the virus hither Whereby my features rot away And vital powers wither; Yet had they not traversed the seas And come infected back, Why, think of all the luxuries That modern life would lack.

  Richard Wilbur

  Men, Thinking, Sea

  1957 'Pangloss's Song', from Candide.

  7 Copy quote

• That's the main business of the poem!-to see if you can't make up a language that sets all your selves talking at once-all of them being fair to each other.

  Richard Wilbur

  Self, Talking, Poetry

  4 Copy quote

• It is not tricks of sense But the time's fright within me which distracts Least fancies into violence

  Richard Wilbur

  Violence, Fancy, Tricks

  1969 Walking to Sleep, 'On the Marginal Way'.

  6 Copy quote

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