Top 100 Quotes About Whitman
#1. After ministering each day to the hundreds of young men who had endured ghastly wounds, submitted to amputations without anesthesia, and often died without the comfort of family or friends, Whitman wrote, nothing of ordinary misfortune seems as it used to.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#2. 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
#3. Seeds in a dry pod, tick, tick, tick, Tick, tick, tick, what little iambics, While Homer and Whitman roared in the pines.
Edgar Lee Masters
#4. 'Beloved Renegade' is a meditation on Walt Whitman, on tenderness, on dying.
Robert Gottlieb
#5. My heroes are, above all, the great 19th-century Americans: Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson and the others. I love the way they think.
Marilynne Robinson
#6. The two authors she brought with her from that period of reading were Whitman and Thoreau - but then, she had been reading them for years, as some people read the Bible.
Doris Lessing
#7. Whitman's poems present no trace of rhyme, save in a couple or so of chance instances. Parts of them, indeed, may be regarded as a warp of prose amid the weft of poetry,
Walt Whitman
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. Only themselves understand themselves, and the like of themselves, As Souls only understand Souls. Walt Whitman
Jed McKenna
#11. Am larger, better than I thought, I did not know I held so much goodness. - Walt Whitman, Song of the Open Road
Anonymous
#12. 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
#14. I meet new Walt Whitmans everyday. There are a dozen of them afloat. I don't know which Walt Whitman I am.
Walt Whitman
#15. This isn't my head I've got on now. I think this is something that used to belong to Walt Whitman.
Dorothy Parker
#16. 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
#17. Walt Whitman, he who laid end to end words never seen in each other's company before outside of a dictionary.
David Lodge
#18. I exist as I am, that is enough" Song of Myself by Walt Whitman
Penelope Douglas
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. Walt Whitman is HOT! I mean, that guy could sound his barbaric yawps over the roofs of my world any time.
John Green
#23. There is little premium in poetry in a world that thinks of Pound and Whitman as a weight and a sampler, not an Ezra, a Walt, a thing of beauty, a joy forever.
Anna Quindlen
#24. I think Whitman more than any other poet possessed the gift of revealing to others the beauty of everything around us, the beauty of nature, the beauty of human beings.
Ella R. Bloor
#25. The last thing I want to hear from a crotch, I yell, is Walt Whitman!
Ron Whipple
#26. I always thought I was going to be a great poet, and go and live in New York, where the great poets lived - you know, where Whitman had walked the streets.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets, William Blake's "Proverbs of Hell," and Walt Whitman's Song of Myself. I
Robin Rinaldi
#30. In vain have oceans been squandered on you, in vain
the sun, wonderfully seen through Whitman's eyes.
You have used up the years and they have used up you,
and still, and still, you have not written the poem.
Jorge Luis Borges
#31. I learned from Whitman that the poem is a temple--or a green field--a place to enter, and in which to feel.
Mary Oliver
#32. So to Hillary Clinton, Liz Cheney, Christine Quinn, Susana Martinez, Meg Whitman, Sheryl Sandberg, Carly Fiorina and every other woman out there who has ever felt more like a professional juggler than a politician, you are our best hope! Run sister, run.
Nicolle Wallace
#33. I would think if you were going to quote Whitman you'd go for something not taken from Leaves Of Grass. Especially if you're going to pull the fancy cultured bitch card.
Leah Clifford
#34. There's something almost adolescent about Whitman's paean to everything that was and remains good about America.
Anita Diament
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. Christine Todd Whitman had to resign as the head of the EPA. You know, when the governor of New Jersey decides the environment is hopeless, you gotta really think that one through.
Greg Giraldo
#38. Ric Flair, the Slim Whitman of Pro-Wrestling.
Roddy Piper
#39. Walt Whitman's a hell of a lot more revolutionary than any Russian poet I've ever heard of.
John Dos Passos
#40. Not for a moment, beautiful aged Walt Whitman, have I failed to see your beard full of butterflies.
Federico Garcia Lorca
#41. Vonnegut is one of America's basic artists, a true and worthy heir to the grand tradition of Thoreau, Whitman, Twain, Dreiser, Traven, Tom Wolfe (the real Tom Wolfe, I mean) and Steinbeck. In other words, he writes out of a concern for justice, love, honesty, and hope.
Edward Abbey
#42. 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
#43. Walt Whitman was right about at least one thing. You will contradict yourself. You are large. You contain multitudes.
Matt Haig
#44. Whitman had a profound influence on me. That was during my sophomore year when I came down with a bad attack of Whitmanitis. But he did me a lot of good, and I think the influence is discoverable.
Conrad Aiken
#45. On a small table beside his chair were other haphazardly stacked volumes by such poets as Emerson, Whitman, and Wallace Stevens, a dangerous crew to let into your head.
Dean Koontz
#46. I figure guys are like Whitman's Samplers. I like to take a little bite out of each and then move on before the whole box gets stale.
Sue Grafton
#47. By the early 1920s, the America of Jefferson, Lincoln, Whitman, and the young William Jennings Bryan had ceased to exist. It had been replaced by the world of McKinley, Teddy Roosevelt, J. Edgar Hoover, and Woodrow Wilson.
Oliver Stone
#48. 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
#49. Walt Whitman said, To have great poets, there must be great audiences.
Jack Canfield
#50. I think that with Bob Dylan around, we're living in an era where we have Whitman presenting new work, we have Dickens presenting new work, we have Yeats and Shakespeare presenting new work. It's that level.
Benmont Tench
#51. I still believe in this country, that it can fulfill the destiny Blake and Whitman envisioned. I still believe in American poetry.
Philip Levine
#52. He who touches the soil of Manhattan and the pavement of New York, touches, whenever he knows or not, Walt Whitman.
Lewis Mumford
#53. The only dance masters I could have were Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Walt Whitman and Nietzsche.
Isadora Duncan
#54. 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
#55. It is no discredit to Walt Whitman that he wrote Leaves of Grass, only that he did not burn it afterwards.
Thomas Wentworth Higginson
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. Blanche:
No, I have the misfortune of being an English instructor. I attempt to instill a bunch of bobby-soxers and drugstore Romeos with a reverence for Hawthorne and Whitman and Poe!
Tennessee Williams
#59. The best way to understand the soul of America is read Walt Whitman's poetry
Dermot McCabe
#61. 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
#62. Monday burn Millay, Wednesday Whitman, Friday Faulkner, burn 'em to ashes, then burn the ashes. That's our official slogan.
Ray Bradbury
#63. 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
#64. I answer that question by saying: 'Why Meg Whitman' which is: I'm not a career politician. I spent 30 years in business. I can tell you that people in California have had it with career politicians: they are done.
Meg Whitman
#65. 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
#66. I think there were two great gay Americans obviously, and that was Abraham Lincoln and Walt Whitman.
Andrew Sullivan
#67. Most thoughtful Americans of today seem to have forgotten how strongly their own and immediate predecessors, Emerson, Hawthorne and Whitman, were still preoccupied with the essence behind things.
Johan Huizinga
#68. Vegas has the Whitman's Sampler of audiences. They come from all different places, so you have to do some crowd psychology. You have to find the heartbeat of the room. It doesn't shift my jokes, but it shifts my timing and my attention.
Hal Sparks
#69. This is why it is good to remember: if you want to get high, don't drink whiskey; read Shakespeare, Tennyson, Keats, Neruda, Hopkins, Millay, Whitman, aloud and let your body sing.
Natalie Goldberg
#70. Artist Allen Crawford brings Whitman's undying text to new life in gorgeous hand-lettering and illustrations, transforming the 60-page poem originally published in 1855 as the centerpiece of Leaves of Grass into a breathtaking 256-page piece of art.
Maria Popova
#71. 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
#72. Some of his own closeness to nature, his great love for human beings, was passed on by Whitman to all of us who knew and loved him.
Ella R. Bloor
#73. 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
#74. I'll project myself into several futures simultaneously," I should have said, "a minor tremor in my hand; I'll work my way from irony to sincerity in the sinking city, a would-be Whitman of the vulnerable grid.
Ben Lerner
#75. She gave him books of poetry: Wordsworth, Whitman, all the W's. When she'd ask him how he liked them, he would say, "Fine. I'm on page ... " and then he would tell her what page he was on and how many pages he'd accomplished that day.
Lorrie Moore
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. It will probably be admitted that Miller is a writer out of the ordinary, worth more than a single glance; and, after all, he is a completely negative, unconstructive, amoral writer, a mere Jonah, a passive accepter of evil, a sort of Whitman among the corpses.
George Orwell
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. My very identities as a reader and a writer began at the Walt Whitman branch library.
Paula Spencer
#82. Forget Orson Welles, and heed Walt Whitman: "I am large, I contain multitudes."5
Ed Yong
#83. Walter rolled his eyes. "Sack up, kid." "Amen, Whitman," Nixon agreed.
David Edison
#84. American poets celebrate their bodies, very specifically, as Whitman did.
Diane Wakoski
#85. 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
#86. You know what Arnold Schwarzenegger and Meg Whitman have in common? They both got in trouble for stiffing the maid.
Jay Leno
#87. Mother prescribing her books like medicines. A good dose of Whitman would set me straight, like castor oil. But at least she was thinking of me. I existed once more.
Janet Fitch
#88. And as to me, I know of nothing else but miracles. WALT WHITMAN
Jack Kornfield
#89. If Henry Miller often sounded like a village idiot, it is because, like Whitman, he was the rest of the village as well.
Gore Vidal
#90. Life is short, but it is wide. Genevieve Whitman taught me that.
Rebecca Wells
#91. Re-examine all you have been told. Dismiss what insults your soul. - Walt Whitman
Laurie A. Helgoe
#92. 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
#93. A half-hour conversation with Binky was like eating a Whitman Sampler in one sitting.
Armistead Maupin
#94. The poetry of Walt Whitman. I can return again and again to these magnificent poems and still get pleasure from reading them.
Robert Littell
#95. I have the kiss of Walt Whitman still on my lips
Oscar Wilde
#96. The kind of poet who founds and reconstitutes values is somebody like Yeats or Whitman - these are public value-founders.
Seamus Heaney
#97. Whitman Press will publish three children's textbooks, based on your creed, for which you'll deliver manuscripts and artwork. The three books are: 1. Dagon and Jill 2. The Shadow Over Humpty Dumpty 3. A Children's Necronomicon (with pop-up section)
H.P. Lovecraft
#98. Robert Burns in his splendid indifference to rank, and Whitman in his glorification of common things, have points of kinship with him. But to such radiant white heart of child-likeness, it would be impossible to find a perfect counterpart.
Sister Nivedita
#99. 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
#100. Anne Sexton knows the mind, Walt Whitman knows grass, but Emily Dickinson knows everything.
Matt Haig
