E. E. Cummings Quotes & Sayings

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

#2. The world is mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful.

#3. 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'.

E. E. Cummings

#4. Be of love(a little)
More careful
Than everything

E. E. Cummings

#5. 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.

E. E. Cummings

#6. 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

E. E. Cummings

#7. We're anything brighter than even the sun

E. E. Cummings

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

E. E. Cummings

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

E. E. Cummings

#10. i will wade out until my thighs are steeped in burning flowers. i will take the sun in my mouth and leap into the ripe air

E. E. Cummings

#11. When skies are hanged and oceans drowned, the single secret will still be man.

E. E. Cummings

#12. 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

E. E. Cummings

#13. Relax and give the play a chance to strut its stuff - relax, stop wondering what it's all 'about' - like many strange and familiar things, Life included, this Play isn't 'about,' it simply is. Don't try to enjoy it, let it try to enjoy you. Don't try to understand it, let it try to understand you.

E. E. Cummings

#14. Laughing is just another way of showing people your wise

E. E. Cummings

#15. 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.

E. E. Cummings

#16. Annie died the other day
never was there such a lay
whom,among her dollies,dad
first("don't tell your mother")had

E. E. Cummings

#17. 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 ...

E. E. Cummings

#18. If you like my poems let them
walk in the evening, a little behind you

E. E. Cummings

#19. A wind has blown the rain away & the sky away & all the leaves away, & the trees stand. i think i, too, have known autumn too long.

E. E. Cummings

#20. May I be I is the only prayer
not may I be great or good or beautiful or wise or strong.

E. E. Cummings

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

E. E. Cummings

#22. 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.

E. E. Cummings

#23. The only man, woman, or child who ever wrote a simple declarative sentence with seven grammatical errors is dead.

E. E. Cummings

#24. 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

E. E. Cummings

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

E. E. Cummings

#26. All nothing's only our hugest home;
the most who die, the more we live

E. E. Cummings

#27. You have played,
(I think)
And broke the toys you were fondest of,
And are a little tired now;
Tired of things that break, and
Just tired.
So am I.

E. E. Cummings

#28. Goddamn everything but the circus

E. E. Cummings

#29. Yes is a pleasant country:
if's wintry
(my lovely)
let's open the year
both is the very weather
(not either)
my treasure,
when violets appear
love is a deeper season
than reason;
my sweet one
(and april's where we're)

E. E. Cummings

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

E. E. Cummings

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

E. E. Cummings

#32. a billion brains may coax undeath
from fancied fact and spaceful time--
no heart can leap, no soul can breathe
but by the sizeless truth of a dream
whose sleep is the sky and the earth and the sea
For love are in you am in i are in we

E. E. Cummings

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

E. E. Cummings

#34. Lady, i will touch you with my mind. Touch you and touch and touch until you give me suddenly a smile, shyly obscene (lady i will touch you with my mind.)Touch you, that is all, lightly and you utterly will become with infinite ease the poem which i do not write.

E. E. Cummings

#35. I think you will be tired of telling
me & my dreams to go to hell

E. E. Cummings

#36. Time cannot children,poets,lovers tell-
measure imagine,mystery,a kiss
-not though mankind would rather know than feel

E. E. Cummings

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

E. E. Cummings

#38. No evil is so worse than worst you fall in hate with love

E. E. Cummings

#39. 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

E. E. Cummings

#40. Because only the truest things always are true because they can't be true

E. E. Cummings

#41. N OthI n g can s urPas s the m y SteR y of s tilLnes s

E. E. Cummings

#42. feeling is first,

E. E. Cummings

#43. 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

E. E. Cummings

#44. A noone who,till their and your returning,
spends the forever of his loneliness
dreaming their eyes have opened to your morning

E. E. Cummings

#45. Hate blows a bubble of despair into
hugeness world system universe and bang
-fear buries a tomorrow under woe
and up comes yesterday most green and young

E. E. Cummings

#46. 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

E. E. Cummings

#47. 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?

E. E. Cummings

#48. Unless you love someone, nothing else makes sense.

E. E. Cummings

#49. Sunlight is
(life and day are)only loaned:whereas
night is given(night and death and the rain
are given;and given is how beautifully snow)

E. E. Cummings

#50. Love is the whole and more than all.

E. E. Cummings

#51. 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

E. E. Cummings

#52. (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)

E. E. Cummings

#53. And so my advice to all young people who wish to become poets is: do something easy, like learning how to blow up the world- unless you're not only willing, but glad, to feel and work and fight till you die.

E. E. Cummings

#54. The blond absence of any program except last and always and first to live makes unimportant what i and you believe;

E. E. Cummings

#55. Her lips drink water but her heart drinks wine.

E. E. Cummings

#56. 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

E. E. Cummings

#57. 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

E. E. Cummings

#58. Accept all happiness from me.
Then shall i turn my face, and hear one bird
sing terribly afar in the lost lands.
in the lost lands

E. E. Cummings

#59. 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

E. E. Cummings

#60. (here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide) and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart) Edward Estlin Cummings

E. E. Cummings

#61. Hopes dance best on bald men's hair

E. E. Cummings

#62. No time ago
or else a life
walking in the dark
i met christ
jesus)my heart
flopped over
and lay still
while he passed(as
close as i'm to you
yes closer
made of nothing
except loneliness.

E. E. Cummings

#63. 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 ...

E. E. Cummings

#64. (a moon swims out of a cloud
a clock strikes midnight
a finger pulls a trigger
a bird flies into a mirror)

E. E. Cummings

#65. Favor everything without exception that makes people different: discourage everything whatsoever that makes people alike. The Rest follows

E. E. Cummings

#66. deeds cannot dream what dreams can do

E. E. Cummings

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

E. E. Cummings

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

E. E. Cummings

#69. His lips drink water
but his heart drinks wine

E. E. Cummings

#70. Because of his unusual way of handling language, Cummings had to travel a long road from the time his early books were ridiculed for their eccentricity to the point at which, with Robert Frost, he was one of the two most popular poets in America.

E. E. Cummings

#71. So truly perfectly the skies
by merciful love whispered were,
completes its brightness with your eyes
any illimitable star.

E. E. Cummings

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

E. E. Cummings

#73. The moon rattles like a fragment of angry candy

E. E. Cummings

#74. ...and down they forgot as up they grew.

E. E. Cummings

#75. The hills
like poets put on
purple thought against
the
magnificent clamor of
day
tortured
in gold

E. E. Cummings

#76. Exists no miracle mightier than this: to feel.

E. E. Cummings

#77. Along the brittle treacherous bright streets
of memory comes my heart,singing like
an idiot,whispering like a drunken man

E. E. Cummings

#78. Art is a mystery. A mystery is something immeasurable.

E. E. Cummings

#79. Since Feeling is first who ever pays any attention to the syntax of things will never wholly kiss you ...

E. E. Cummings

#80. Down with ought with because with every brain that thinks it thinks nor dares to feel.

E. E. Cummings

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

E. E. Cummings

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

E. E. Cummings

#83. When god decided to invent everything he took one reath bigger than a circustent and everything began

E. E. Cummings

#84. Unbeing dead isn't being alive.

E. E. Cummings

#85. The eyes of my eyes are opened.

E. E. Cummings

#86. ...we're a mystery which will never happen again, a miracle which has never happened before...

E. E. Cummings

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

E. E. Cummings

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

E. E. Cummings

#89. Equality is what does not exist among mortals.

E. E. Cummings

#90. Our can'ts were born to happen our mosts have died in more

E. E. Cummings

#91. 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 rib cage.

E. E. Cummings

#92. Life ,for eternal us,is now

E. E. Cummings

#93. Whenever you think or you believe or you know, you're a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you're nobody-but-yourself.

E. E. Cummings

#94. All which isn't singing is mere talking ... and all talking's to oneself alone but the very song of(as mountains feel and lovers)singing is silence

E. E. Cummings