Top 36 Richard Wilbur Quotes

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

Richard Wilbur

Richard Wilbur Quotes #101085
#2. 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

Richard Wilbur Quotes #143903
#3. 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

Richard Wilbur Quotes #178946
#4. Caught Summer is always an imagined time. Time gave it, yes, but time out of any mind. There must be prime In the heart to beget that season, to reach past rain and find Riding the palest days Its perfect blaze.

Richard Wilbur

Richard Wilbur Quotes #217049
#5. Tanka
Black-and-white Holsteins
Crowd downfield at feeding time,
Mingling their blotches.
It is like ice breaking up
In a dark, swollen river.

Richard Wilbur

Richard Wilbur Quotes #242074
#6. The strength of the genie comes from being in a bottle.

Richard Wilbur

Richard Wilbur Quotes #308394
#7. Whatever pains disease may bring Are but the tangy seasoning To Loves delicious fare.

Richard Wilbur

Richard Wilbur Quotes #558133
#8. It is not tricks of sense But the time's fright within me which distracts Least fancies into violence

Richard Wilbur

Richard Wilbur Quotes #602035
#9. The eye is pleased when nature stoops to art.

Richard Wilbur

Richard Wilbur Quotes #607170
#10. As a queen sits down, knowing that a chair will be there,
Or a general raises his hand and is given the field-glasses,
Step off assuredly into the blank of your mind.
Something will come to you.

Richard Wilbur

Richard Wilbur Quotes #769978
#11. Composition for me is, externally at least, scarcely distinguishable from catatonia.

Richard Wilbur

Richard Wilbur Quotes #852826
#12. Odd that a thing is most itself when likened

Richard Wilbur

Richard Wilbur Quotes #857689
#13. Step off assuredly into the blank of your own mind. Something will come to you. Although at first You nod through nothing like a fogbound prow, Gravel will breed in the margins of your gaze

Richard Wilbur

Richard Wilbur Quotes #861874
#14. Teach me, like you, to drink creation whole/ And casting out myself, become a soul.

Richard Wilbur

Richard Wilbur Quotes #862437
#15. 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

Richard Wilbur Quotes #862539
#16. Young as she is, the stuff / Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy: / I wish her a lucky passage.

Richard Wilbur

Richard Wilbur Quotes #891640
#17. 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

Richard Wilbur Quotes #916106
#18. 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

Richard Wilbur Quotes #997475
#19. 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

Richard Wilbur Quotes #1092595
#20. I die of thirst here at the fountainside.

Richard Wilbur

Richard Wilbur Quotes #1129222
#21. A thrush, because I'd been wrong, Burst rightly into song In a world not vague, not lonely, Not governed by me only.

Richard Wilbur

Richard Wilbur Quotes #1220131
#22. Happy in all that ragged, loose collapse of water, the fountain, its effortless descent and flatteries of spray ...

Richard Wilbur

Richard Wilbur Quotes #1302495
#23. Writing is?waiting for the word that may not be there until next Tuesday.

Richard Wilbur

Richard Wilbur Quotes #1314047
#24. What you hope for Is that at some point of the pointless journey, Indoors or out, and when you least expect it, Right in the middle of your stride, like that, So neatly that you never feel a thing, The kind assassin Sleep will draw a bead And blow your brains out.

Richard Wilbur

Richard Wilbur Quotes #1411065
#25. All that we do is touched with ocean, and yet we remain on the shore of what we know

Richard Wilbur

Richard Wilbur Quotes #1429533
#26. 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

Richard Wilbur Quotes #1484308
#27. Most women know that sex isgood for headaches.

Richard Wilbur

Richard Wilbur Quotes #1486373
#28. If the king had given me for my own
Paris, his citadel,
And I for that must leave alone
Her whom I love so well,
I'd say then to the Crown
Take back your glittering town
My darling is more fair, I swear.
My darling is more fair.

Richard Wilbur

Richard Wilbur Quotes #1533118
#29. To this congress the poet speaks not of peculiar and personal things, but of what in himself is most common, most anonymous, most fundamental, most true of all men.

Richard Wilbur

Richard Wilbur Quotes #1551142
#30. It is always a matter, my darling,
Of life or death, as I had forgotten. I wish
What I wished you before, but harder.

Richard Wilbur

Richard Wilbur Quotes #1665437
#31. 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

Richard Wilbur Quotes #1712069
#32. To claim, at a dead party, to have spotted a grackle,
When in fact you haven't of late, can do no harm.

Richard Wilbur

Richard Wilbur Quotes #1742185
#33. What's lightly hid is deepest understood,

Richard Wilbur

Richard Wilbur Quotes #1762761
#34. Now winter downs the dying of the year,
And night is all a settlement of snow;
From the soft street the rooms of houses show
A gathered light, a shapen atmosphere,
Like frozen-over lakes whose ice is thin
And still allows some stirring down within.

Richard Wilbur

Richard Wilbur Quotes #1784444
#35. The beautiful changes
In such kind ways,
Wishing ever to sunder
Things and things' selves for a second finding, to lose
For a moment all that it touches back to wonder.

Richard Wilbur

Richard Wilbur Quotes #1791280
#36. 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

Richard Wilbur Quotes #1815283

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