Kooser Quotes

#1. BEFORE THERE WAS BILLY COLLINS & TED KOOSER, THERE WAS EDGAR GUEST

Ron Silliman

#2. At the other side
of the galaxy, a star thirty-five times
the size of our own sun exploded
and vanished, leaving a small green spot
on the astronomer's retina
as he stood in the great open dome
of my heart with no one to tell.

Ted Kooser

#3. There are mornings when everything brims with promise, even my empty cup.

Ted Kooser

#4. When she left me
I stood out in the thunderstorm,
hoping to be destroyed by lightning.
It missed, first left, then right.

Ted Kooser

#5. This evening, I sat by an open window and read till the light was gone and the book was no more than a part of the darkness ...

Ted Kooser

#6. It is all around us, free, this wonderful life: clear jingle of tire chains, the laughter of ice that breaks under our boots. Each hour's a gift to those who take it up.

Ted Kooser

#7. If I don't take the risk, I'll wind up with a bloodless poem. I have to be out there on the edge.

Ted Kooser

#8. Keeping a journal is like taking good care of one's heart.

Ted Kooser

#9. Turtle has just one plan at a time, and every cell buys into it.

Ted Kooser

#10. Jose Palacios, his oldest servant, found him floating naked with his eyes open in the purifying waters of his bath and thought he had drowned.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

#11. Valentine's Day is the poet's holiday.

Ted Kooser

#12. Love is a diseased affection

Aubrey Morgan

#13. All night, this soft rain from The distant past. No wonder I sometimes Waken as a child.

Ted Kooser

#14. I farm a little plot of things to say, with not much frontage on the busy road.

Ted Kooser

#15. What are you?" I said irritably.
"In the Serengeti, Ms. Lane, I would be the cheetah. I'm stronger, smarter, faster, and hungrier than everything else out there. And I don't apologize to the gazelle when I take it down.

Karen Marie Moning

#16. *Brian talking about baby Alex* - Just give him his bottle and sit watching metal videos with him until he goes back to sleep, right? How hard can it be?

Cherrie Lynn

#17. Mike Forsberg's images give us bright openings onto a world ... Here on the Great Plains both people and trees and everything else are in some way shaped by wind and weather. This book, too, has been shaped by where it comes from, and that's just a part of its beauty.

Ted Kooser

#18. The Coventry School Committee has been ahead of the curve in addressing the nutrition needs of our students. This committee is an extension of a process begun more than a year ago to ensure the foods we offer had high nutritional value.

Michael Reeves

#19. She'd had little patience with darkness, and her heart
held only a measure of shadow. I touched
the warm dust of those colors, her tools,
and left there with light on the tips of my fingers.

Ted Kooser

#20. Wisdom is easy to carry but difficult to load.

Ted Kooser

#21. Sometimes I look at my own movies

Ann Petry

#22. In big houses in which things are done properly, there is always the religious element. The diurnal cycle is observed with more feeling when there are servants to do the work.

Elizabeth Bowen

#23. a storm that walked on legs of lightning,
dragging its shaggy belly over the fields.

Ted Kooser

#24. Painting constantly appeared to me as the one and only possible achievement.

Max Beckmann

#25. Don't talk to me about the stars, about how cold and indifferent they are, about the unimaginable distances. There are millions of stars within us that are just as far, and people like me sometimes burn up a whole life trying to reach them.

Ted Kooser

#26. The treasury doesn't belong to the king, it belongs to the people." "I've tried that one before. It didn't work. If you can get arrested for taking something, it's not yours." "That's

Heidi Heilig

#27. A 'death mirror' held up to American culture - Brando, bikes and black leather; Christ, chains and cocaine. A 'high' view of the myth of the American motorcyclist. The machine as totem from toy to terror. Thanatos in chrome and black leather and bursting jeans.

Kenneth Anger

#28. I like the idea of there being times when even words cost so much you used them sparingly. I have known a lot of old men and women who talked as if they were paying Western Union by the word.

Ted Kooser

#29. High aims form high characters, and great objects bring out great minds.

Tryon Edwards

#30. Just as a dancer, turning and turning, may fill the dusty light with the soft swirl of her flying skirts, our weeping willow
now old and broken , creaking in the breeze
turns slowly, slowly in the winter sun, sweeping the rusty roof of the barn with the pale blue lacework of her shadow.

Ted Kooser

#31. There's nothing wrong with delighting in what you do. In fact, most of the fun you'll have as a poet will come about during the process of writing.

Ted Kooser

#32. Music evokes emotion and emotion can bring it's memory.

Oliver Sacks

#33. Sometimes you sense how faithfully your life is delivered, even though you can't read the address.

Ted Kooser

#34. When you talk to people who have been in combat, there's a sensory overload that happens. The color becomes vivid. Sounds become more pronounced. People talk about how, for them, the war was technicolor and real life was black and white after the war.

David Ayer

#35. Never give up fighting against the universe because we exist in life through action, through fighting!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#36. The poem is the device through which the ordinary world is seen in a new way - engaging, compelling, even beautiful.

Ted Kooser

#37. A poem is a record of a discovery.

Ted Kooser

#38. His hands fluttered like birds,
each with a fancy silk ribbon
to weave into their nest,
as he stood at the mirror
dressing for work, waving hello
to himself with both hands.

Ted Kooser

#39. ... sometimes in life, passion haste take a backseat to more everyday concerns. -said Trinh Cung

Gerard Sasges