Elizabeth Smart
The long days seduce all thought away, and we lie like the lizards in the sun, postponing our lives indefinitely.Collection: Lying
I review all I know, but can synthesize no meaning. When I doze, the Fact, the certain accomplished calamity, wakes me roughly like a brutal nurse. I see it crouching inflexibly in a corner of the ceiling. It comes down in geometrical diagonal like lightning.It says, I remain, I AM, I shall never cease to be: your memory will grow a deathly glaze: you will forget, you will fade out, but I cannot be undone.Thus every quarter hour it puts the taste of death in my mouth, and shows me, but not gently, how I go whoring after oblivion.Collection: Memories
If I had my wilderness, nature could be my lover. What can I do in the paved streets for my thirsty roots? I waste time. I encourage fools. I slip the vital hours into penny slot machines -- to pass time, to start my stuck wheels only love can oil.Collection: Oil
You have to be slightly blind to believe in any cause.Collection: Believe
What is poetry? Do not enquire. The secret dies by prying. How does the heart beat? I fainted when I saw it on the screen, opening and closing like a flower ... Poetry is like this, it is life moving, terrible, vivid. Look the other way when you write, or you might faint.Collection: Flower
I am overrun, infested with a menagerie of desires.Collection: Desire
April 19 And now it is spring. Birds are singing. Wistful notes and jubilant. And bare streets and no need for coats, and skipping ropes and bicycles and a thin new moon.Collection: Spring
You have to have short fingernails or they'd just break off, and you can't wear red polish - it looks like your fingers are bleeding.Collection: Break Off
It's because I'm only interested in the big things that I'm not interested in politics.Collection: Bigs