Lisel Mueller Quotes

#1. How swiftly the strained honey
of afternoon light
flows into darkness
and the closed bud shrugs off
its special mystery
in order to break into blossom:
as if what exists, exists
so that it can be lost
and become precious

Lisel Mueller

#2. Total abstinence is so excellent a thing that it cannot be carried to too great an extent. In my passion for it I even carry it so far as to totally abstain from total abstinence itself.

Mark Twain

#3. How I would paint happiness
Something hidden, a windfall,
A meteor shower. No-
A flowering tree releasing
all its blossoms at once,
and the one standing beneath it
unexpectedly robed in bloom ...

Lisel Mueller

#4. Isn't it sad how some people's grip on their lives is so precarious that they'll embrace any preposterous delusion rather than face an occasional bleak truth?

Bill Watterson

#5. The defects of great men are the consolation of the dunces.

Isaac D'Israeli

#6. I search the language for a word
to tell you how red is red.

Lisel Mueller

#7. Keeping a diary is advanced-level living. I spend way too much time trying not to curl up in the corner like a giant fetus & weep to keep a diary.

Alissa Nutting

#8. This poem is endless, the odds against us are endless,
our chances of being alive together
statistically nonexistent;

Lisel Mueller

#9. God does not patch up the old life,
or make certain repairs on the old life;
He gives a new life, through the new birth.

Kathryn Kuhlman

#10. Most of sex is psychological - most of it is between our ears and not between our legs.

Joy Browne

#11. Memory and poetry go together, absolutely. It is a matter of preserving and of remembering things.

Lisel Mueller

#12. There is nothing that can equal the treasure of so many shared memories.

Antoine De Saint-Exupery

#13. I will not return to a universe
of objects that do not know each other, as if islands were not the long lost children of one great continent

Lisel Mueller

#14. The rule of Nobody ... is what the political form known as bureaucracy truly is.

Hannah Arendt

#15. Everything is autobiography, even if one writes something that is totally objective. The fact that it's a subject that seizes you makes it autobiographical.

Lisel Mueller

#16. When I was in college, I did do some writing of poetry, somewhat inspired, I think at that time, by Carl Sandburg, because English was still relatively new to me, and Sandburg, of course, wrote in a very easy-to-understand, very colloquial and informal manner.

Lisel Mueller

#17. I thought if only we could go on
and meet again, shy as strangers.

Lisel Mueller

#18. Good writing happens when human beings follow particular steps to take control of their sentences-to make their words do what they want them to do.

Ralph Fletcher

#19. Whatever was bound to happen
in my story did not happen.
But I know there are rules that cannot be broken.
Perhaps a name was changed.
A small mistake. Perhaps
a woman I do not know
is facing the day with the heavy heart
that, by all rights, should have been mine.

Lisel Mueller

#20. Set a master goal for your running and for your life.

Gerry Lindgren

#21. Well, language seems to be something that obsesses me. I'm always writing about it.

Lisel Mueller

#22. At home the bookshelves connected heaven and earth.

Lisel Mueller

#23. Sometimes she liked to search for animals and faces in the shapen clouds of a summer day. Flames were too quick and fluid for the eye to glimpse the suggestion of any presence other than fire,

Dean Koontz

#24. Truth be told, our modern education systems crush the very spirit they claim to instill.

Matthew Kelly

#25. Poetry, for me, is the answer to, 'How does one stay sane when private lives are being ransacked by public events?' It's something that hangs over your head all the time.

Lisel Mueller

#26. When I am asked
how I began writing poems,
I talk about the indifference of nature.

Lisel Mueller

#27. While I live my life expecting to live, others expect that they might die. The rules of the world are not the same for all of us.

Jessica Posner

#28. Someone was always leaving
and never coming back.
The wooden houses wait like old wives
along this road; they are everywhere,
abandoned, leaning, turning gray.

Lisel Mueller

#29. My husband says spring will be early.
He says this every year,
And every year I disagree.
He needs me, the dark side of the planetary equation.
Together we make the equinox.

Lisel Mueller

#30. You are what your deep, driving desire is. As your desire is, so is your will. As your will is, so is your deed. As your deed is, so is your destiny. [ Brihadaranyaka IV.4.5 ]

Anonymous

#31. By the time I arrive at evening, / they have just settled down to rest; / already invisible, they are turning / into the dreamwork of the trees ... .

Lisel Mueller

#32. I am imprinted with the whole sense of European history, especially German history, going back to World War I, which really destroyed all the old values and culture. My grandparents had been reasonably well-off but they became quite poor, living in an attic apartment.

Lisel Mueller

#33. One of the reasons I love writing for middle graders, besides their voracious appetite for books, is their deep concern for fairness and morality.

K.A. Applegate

#34. Now in the thriving season of love
when the bud relents into flower,
your love turned absence has turned once more,
and if my comforts fall soft as rain
on her flutters, it is because
love grows by what it remembers of love

Lisel Mueller

#35. You shall not twist my bones into a star's shape, nor plant my hair as roots for the dreams of the living; and if you open my heart and run your poet's fingers over its walls and cushions you will find it is like yours, dark.

Lisel Mueller