Top 100 Quotes About Walt Whitman
#1. 54. The children of the Spanish lion, said Ruben Dario, a born optimist. The children of Walt Whitman, Jose Marti, and Violeta Parra; torn apart, forgotten, in mass graves, at the bottom of the sea, the Trojan destiny of their mingled bones terrifying the survivors.
Roberto Bolano
#2. 'Beloved Renegade' is a meditation on Walt Whitman, on tenderness, on dying.
Robert Gottlieb
#3. Be composed
be at ease with me
I am Walt Whitman, liberal and lusty as Nature, Not till the sun excludes you do I exclude you, Not till the waters refuse to glisten for you and the leaves to rustle for you, do my words refuse to glisten and rustle for you.
Walt Whitman
#4. I get the urge to feel it, too, so when she takes her hand away, I turn her toward me and I feel the edges of New Jersey. I kiss Hoboken and Atlantic City. I kiss Newark and Trenton. I kiss Camden, and then I follow the road west, over the Walt Whitman Bridge into Pennsylvania. And I kiss home.
A.S. King
#5. Only themselves understand themselves, and the like of themselves, As Souls only understand Souls. Walt Whitman
Jed McKenna
#6. Am larger, better than I thought, I did not know I held so much goodness. - Walt Whitman, Song of the Open Road
Anonymous
#7. Walt Whitman, who worked as a nurse in the hospital wards, that the harrowing experience made one's "little cares and difficulties" disappear "into nothing.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#9. I meet new Walt Whitmans everyday. There are a dozen of them afloat. I don't know which Walt Whitman I am.
Walt Whitman
#10. This isn't my head I've got on now. I think this is something that used to belong to Walt Whitman.
Dorothy Parker
#11. As Walt Whitman correctly surmised, we are large and we harbour multitudes within us. And those multitudes are locked in chronic battle. There is an ongoing conversation among the different factions in your brain, each competing to control the single output channel of your behaviour.
Damian Thompson
#12. Walt Whitman, he who laid end to end words never seen in each other's company before outside of a dictionary.
David Lodge
#13. I exist as I am, that is enough" Song of Myself by Walt Whitman
Penelope Douglas
#14. We all fear loneliness, madness, dying. Shakespeare and Walt Whitman, Leopardi and Hart Crane will not cure those fears. And yet these poets bring us fire and light.
Harold Bloom
#15. Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son, Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding, No sentimentalist, no stander above men and women or apart from them, No more modest than immodest.
Walt Whitman
#16. By the way, Reb, about the singing. What gives? Walt Whitman sang the body electric. Billie Holiday sang the blues. You sang ... everything. You could sing the phone book. I would call and say how are you feeling, and you'd answer, The old gray rabbi, ain't what he used to be ...
Mitch Albom
#17. Walt Whitman is HOT! I mean, that guy could sound his barbaric yawps over the roofs of my world any time.
John Green
#18. The last thing I want to hear from a crotch, I yell, is Walt Whitman!
Ron Whipple
#19. I had parents who were attentive to what was going on politically. There was the Greek connection, a sense of a larger world. People coming in from abroad. There was a sense of community around ideas: a discourse and an adhesiveness which is my favorite word from [Walt] Whitman.
Anne Waldman
#20. Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" is still in print. They're debating right now over Mark Twain. He's still available. Winslow Homer can still be seen. Our arts are - they're there. We got to go get them and understand that this is an important legacy for our country.
Wynton Marsalis
#21. T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets, William Blake's "Proverbs of Hell," and Walt Whitman's Song of Myself. I
Robin Rinaldi
#22. I look for the moment(s) in the story where the writer risked abandoning the glory of the self in favor of the possible relationship with an other. I don't ever let the market tell me what a memoir is. The first best memoir I ever read was Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman.
Lidia Yuknavitch
#23. When Walt Whitman writes in seeming defiance of tradition, he needs tradition for his protection, for the butcher and the baker and the candlestick-maker grow merry over him when they meet his work by chance.
William Butler Yeats
#24. Walt Whitman's a hell of a lot more revolutionary than any Russian poet I've ever heard of.
John Dos Passos
#25. Not for a moment, beautiful aged Walt Whitman, have I failed to see your beard full of butterflies.
Federico Garcia Lorca
#26. It's art that pushes against psychological and social expectations, that tries to transform decay into something generative, that is replicative in a baroque way, that isn't about progress, and wants to - as Walt Whitman put it - 'contain multitudes.'
Jerry Saltz
#27. Walt Whitman was right about at least one thing. You will contradict yourself. You are large. You contain multitudes.
Matt Haig
#28. I always knew in my heart Walt Whitman's mind to be more like my own than any other man's living. As he is a very great scoundrel this is not a pleasant confession.
Gerard Manley Hopkins
#29. Walt Whitman said, To have great poets, there must be great audiences.
Jack Canfield
#30. He who touches the soil of Manhattan and the pavement of New York, touches, whenever he knows or not, Walt Whitman.
Lewis Mumford
#31. The only dance masters I could have were Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Walt Whitman and Nietzsche.
Isadora Duncan
#32. Art is a luxury. It's not necessary for you to - you can work your job and you can make some money and never know who Walt Whitman was, and never read a poem.
Wynton Marsalis
#33. It is no discredit to Walt Whitman that he wrote Leaves of Grass, only that he did not burn it afterwards.
Thomas Wentworth Higginson
#34. I gotta say - if I clicked on a movie interview, and the first part was all about Walt Whitman, I'd love that article.
Adam McKay
#35. Molecules are moving. Universes are colliding. Generations are being born and dying simultaneously, throughout eternity. As one of our great American poets, Walt Whitman, once said: "I contain multitudes."
Frederick Lenz
#36. The best way to understand the soul of America is read Walt Whitman's poetry
Dermot McCabe
#38. Walt Whitman and Emerson are the poets who have given the world more than anyone else. Perhaps Whitman is not so widely read in England, but England never appreciates a poet until he is dead.
Oscar Wilde
#39. I really love poetry. I'm a big E.E. Cummings fan and a big Walt Whitman fan, and I have a big book of poetry.
Mae Whitman
#40. Walt Whitman defended the sacredness of love, the purity of passion - the passion that builds every home and fills the world with art and song.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#41. I think there were two great gay Americans obviously, and that was Abraham Lincoln and Walt Whitman.
Andrew Sullivan
#42. Sometimes when I've got a baseball player alone, I'll just read Emily Dickinson or Walt Whitman to him. And the guys are so sweet, they always stay and listen. Course, a guy'll listen to anything if he thinks its foreplay.
Ron Shelton
#43. Walt Whitman is the only great modern poet who does not seem to experience discord when he faces his world. Not even solitude - his monologue is a universal chorus.
Octavio Paz
#44. There's very little authentic study of the humanities remaining. My research assistant came to me two years ago saying she'd been in a seminar in which the teacher spent two hours saying that Walt Whitman was a racist. This isn't even good nonsense. It's insufferable.
Harold Bloom
#45. INCOMPOSSIBLE, adj. Unable to exist if something else exists. Two things are incompossible when the world of being has scope enough for one of them, but not enough for both - as Walt Whitman's poetry and God's mercy to man.
Ambrose Bierce
#46. My chief literary influences have been Paul Laurence Dunbar, Carl Sandburg, and Walt Whitman. My favorite public figures include Jimmy Durante, Marlene Dietrich, Mary McLeod Bethune, Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Marian Anderson, and Henry Armstrong.
Langston Hughes
#47. So who's perfect? ... Washington had false teeth. Franklin was nearsighted. Mussolini had syphilis. Unpleasant things have been said about Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde. Tchaikovsky had his problems, too. And Lincoln was constipated.
John O'Hara
#48. My very identities as a reader and a writer began at the Walt Whitman branch library.
Paula Spencer
#49. Forget Orson Welles, and heed Walt Whitman: "I am large, I contain multitudes."5
Ed Yong
#50. One world is aware, and by far the largest to me, and that is myself, And whether I come to my own today or in ten thousand or ten million years, I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness, I can wait. WALT WHITMAN, Leaves of Grass
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#51. And as to me, I know of nothing else but miracles. WALT WHITMAN
Jack Kornfield
#52. Re-examine all you have been told. Dismiss what insults your soul. - Walt Whitman
Laurie A. Helgoe
#53. Our culture is what we did together. What did Walt Whitman represent for all of us? What was his message to us? That is an inheritance, and when we squander that inheritance we act outside. We don't know who we are; we don't know where we are.
Wynton Marsalis
#54. The poetry of Walt Whitman. I can return again and again to these magnificent poems and still get pleasure from reading them.
Robert Littell
#55. I have the kiss of Walt Whitman still on my lips
Oscar Wilde
#56. The whole imaginative effort of Walt Whitman was really an effort to absorb and animate these multitudinous modern repetitions; and Walt Whitman would be quite capable of including in his lyric litany of optimism a list of the nine hundred and ninety-nine identical bathrooms.
G.K. Chesterton
#57. Anne Sexton knows the mind, Walt Whitman knows grass, but Emily Dickinson knows everything.
Matt Haig
#58. You really felt a radical shift in the advance of a poetics that had really been engendered by [Walt] Whitman. This was very exciting. I wanted to work in this environment.
Anne Waldman
#59. Documentary is, therefore, an approach, which makes use of the artistic faculties to give vivification to fact - to use Walt Whitman's definition of the place of poetry in the modern world.
Beaumont Newhall
#60. [Walt] Whitman would never get in the way of a boy trying to get off with another boy. Bros before prose.
Lisa Henry
#61. I don't know about that. I'm not a very analytical person. I have various impulses. I've often quoted Walt Whitman's phrase "I contain multitudes." I understand that.
Patti Smith
#62. One of Walt Whitman's best-known poems is this one: When I heard the learn'd astronomer, ... The trouble is, Whitman is talking through his hat, but the poor soul didn't know any better
Isaac Asimov
#63. I permit to speak at every hazard,
Nature without check with original energy
Walt Whitman
#65. And there is no trade or employment but the young man following it may become a hero.
Walt Whitman
#66. What doesn't kill you leaves scars, ruins your lungs, dries out all your tears, leaves you lying awake at 4 in the morning
wishing you weren't alive.
Walt Whitman
#67. The fruition of beauty is no chance of hit or miss ... it is inevitable as life.
Walt Whitman
#68. The scent of these arm-pits is aroma finer than prayer ...
Walt Whitman
#69. This is the city, and I am one of the citizens/Whatever interests the rest interests me
Walt Whitman
#70. We all have great things on our bucket lists like skydiving, seeing the Northern Lights etc, but what about simply falling in love? Isn't that the most amazing thing we can do?
Walt Whitman
#71. There's no doubt that I've deserved my enemies, but I don't think I've deserved my friends.
Walt Whitman
#72. I sound my barbaric yawp over the rooftops of the world.
Walt Whitman
#73. I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person.
Walt Whitman
#74. Love, that is day and night - love, that is sun and moon and stars, Love, that is crimson, sumptuous, sick with perfume, no other words but words of love, no other thought but love.
Walt Whitman
#75. Not one escaped to tell the fall of Alamo,
The hundred & fifty are dumb yet at Alamo.
Walt Whitman
#76. Have you not learned the most in your life from those with whom you disagreed - those who saw it differently from you?
Walt Whitman
#77. To drive free, to love free, to court destruction with taunts. One brief house of madness and joy!
Walt Whitman
#78. It is that something in the soul which says, - Rage on, whirl on, I tread master here and everywhere; master of the spasms of the sky and of the shatter of the sea, master of nature and passion and death, and of all terror and all pain.
Walt Whitman
#79. O Earth, that hast no voice, confide to me a voice!
O harvest of my lands! O boundless summer growths!
O lavish, brown, parturient earth! O infinite, teeming womb!
A verse to seek, to see, to narrate thee.
Walt Whitman
#80. You want to know a sure way to lose money? Buy what's popular and don't know what you are investing in.
Walt Whitman
#81. Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes.
Walt Whitman
#82. TO FOREIGN LANDS. I heard that you ask'd for something to prove this puzzle the New World, And to define America, her athletic Democracy, Therefore I send you my poems that you behold in them what you wanted.
Walt Whitman
#83. To me the converging objects of the universe perpetually flow,
Walt Whitman
#84. So here I sit in the early candle-light of old age-I and my book-casting backward glances over out travel'd road.
Walt Whitman
#85. When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom'd / And the great star early droop'd in the western sky in the night, / I mourn'd, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.
Walt Whitman
#87. A great city is that which has the greatest men and women.
Walt Whitman
#88. What blurt is this about virtue and about vice?
Evil propels me and reform of evil propels me, I stand indifferent,
My gait is no fault-finder's or rejecter's gait,
I moisten the roots of all that has grown.
Walt Whitman
#89. But where is what I started for so long ago?
And why is it yet unfound?
Walt Whitman
#90. I will be your poet, I will be more to you than to any of the rest.
Walt Whitman
#91. Liberty is to be subserved, whatever occurs.
Walt Whitman
#92. I will not descend among professors and capitalists.
Walt Whitman
#93. I act as the tongue of you,
... tied in your mouth ... in mine it begins to be loosened.
Walt Whitman
#94. Or may-be one who is puzzled at me.
As if I were not puzzled at myself!
Walt Whitman
#95. To me, every cubic inch of space is a miracle.
Walt Whitman
#96. To me the sea is a continual miracle; The fishes that swim - the rocks - the motion of the waves - the ships, with men in them, what stranger miracles are there?
Walt Whitman
#97. I say the whole earth and all the stars in the sky are for religion's sake.
Walt Whitman
#99. O YOU whom I often and silently come where you are, that I may be with you;
As I walk by your side, or sit near, or remain in the same room with you,
Little you know the subtle electric fire that for your sake is playing within me.
Walt Whitman
#100. Here or henceforward it is all the same to me, I accept Time absolutely.
Walt Whitman
