Charles Wright Quotes

It's linkage I'm talking about, and harmonies and structures, And all the various things that lock our wrists to the past.

The music of memory has its own pitch,/which not everyone hears.

It’s up there, and you can see the front of it. But what it is isn’t what you’re looking at. It’s behind what you’re looking at.

How sweet the past is, no matter how wrong, or how sad. How sweet is yesterday's noise

We've all led raucous lives, some of them inside, some of them out. But only the poem you leave behind is what's important. Everyone knows this. The voyage into the interior is all that matters, Whatever your ride. Sometimes I can't sit still for all the asininities I read. Give me the hummingbird, who has to eat sixty times His own weight a day just to stay alive. Now that's a life on the edge.

It may not be written in any book, but it is written - You can't go back, you can't repeat the unrepeatable.

Some people have everything Other people don't But everything don't mean a thing If it ain't the thing you want

What makes us leave what we love best? What is it inside us that keeps erasing itself When we need it most, That sends us into uncertainty for its own sake And holds us flush there until we begin to love it And have to begin again? What is it within our own lives we decline to live Whenever we find it, making our days unendurable, And nights almost visionless? I still don't know yet, but I do it.

If you want great tranquility/ It's hard work and a long walk

Poetry is the dark side of the moon.

Our dreams are luminous, a cast fire upon the world. Morning arrives and that's it. Sunlight darkens the earth.

The ache for anything is a thick dust in the heart.

Everyone knows this. The voyage into the interior is all that matters, Whatever your ride.

All forms of landscape are autobiographical.

I empty myself with light Until I become morning.

Snub end of a dismal year, deep in the dwarf orchard, The sky with its undercoat of blackwash and point stars, I stand in the dark and answer to My life, this shirt I want to take off, which is on fire . . .

How many times can summer turn to fall in one life?

November’s a burn and an ache.

How many years have slipped through our hands?
At least as many as the constellations we still can identify.
The quarter moon, like a light skiff,
 floats out of the mist-remnants
Of last night’s hard rain.
It, too, will slip through our fingers
 with no ripple, without us in it.