They said, You have a blue guitar, you do not play things as they are. The man replied, Things as they are changed upon a blue guitar.
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Reality is a cliche from which we escape by metaphor.
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To be young is all there is in the world. They talk so beautifully about work and having a family and a home (and I do, too, sometimes) --but it's all worry and head-aches and respectable poverty and forced gushing. Telling people how nice it is, when, in reality, you would give all of your last thirty years for one of your first thirty. Old people are tremendous frauds.
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Life contracts and death is expected, As in a season of autumn. The soldier falls.
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The day of the sun is like the day of a king. It is a promenade in the morning, a sitting on the throne at noon, a pageant in the evening.
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Most modern reproducers of life, even including the camera, really repudiate it. We gulp down evil, choke at good.
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There's no such thing as life; or if there is, It is faster than the weather, faster than...
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The old brown hen and the old blue sky, Between the two we live and die The broken cartwheel on the hill.
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You can't depend on your judgment when your imagination is out of focus.
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For the soldier of time, it breathes a summer sleep, ...
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Abba, dark death is the breaking of a glass. The dazzled flakes and splinters disappear. The seal is as relaxed as dirt, perdu.
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To name an object is to deprive a poem of three-fourths of its pleasure, which consists in a little-by-little guessing game; the ideal is to suggest.
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It is the unknown that excites the ardor of scholars, who, in the known alone, would shrivel up with boredom.
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People fall out of windows, trees tumble down, Summer is changed to winter, the young grow old...
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I can't make head or tail of Life. Love is a fine thing, Art is a fine thing, Nature is a fine thing; but the average human mind and spirit are confusing beyond measure.
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Perhaps there is a degree of perception at which what is real and what is imagines are one: a state of clairvoyant observation, accessible or possibly accessible to the poet or, say, the acutest poet.
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Perhaps it is of more value to infuriate philosophers than to go along with them.
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The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
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Politic man ordained Imagination as the fateful sin. Grandmother and her basketful of pears Must be the crux for our compendia.
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The poet is the priest of the invisible.
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One cannot spend one's time in being modern when there are so many more important things to be.
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Freedom is like a man who kills himself Each night, an incessant butcher, whose knife Grows sharp in blood.
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'Things as they are Are changed upon the blue guitar.'
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Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.
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Poetry is the statement of a relation between a man and the world.
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Say that it is the serenade Of a man that plays a blue guitar.
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How full of trifles everything is! It is only one's thoughts that fill a room with something more than furniture.
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Poetry has to be something more than a conception of the mind. It has to be a revelation of nature. Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.
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It may be that the ignorant man, alone, Has any chance to mate his life with life...
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She says, 'But in contentment I still feel The need of some imperishable bliss.'...
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