Quotations

"We think the fire eats the wood. We are wrong. The wood reaches out to the flame. The fire licks at what the wood harbors, and the wood gives itself away to that intimacy, the manner in which we and the world meet each new day."

— Jack Gilbert, American poet, born 1925

"I ask myself what is the sound of women? What is the word for that still thing I have hunted inside them for so long? Deep inside the avalanche of joy, the thing deeper in the dark, and deeper still in the bed where we are lost. Deeper, deeper down where a woman's heart is holding its breath, where something very far away in that body is becoming something we don't have a name for."

— Jack Gilbert, American poet, born 1925

"We must unlearn the constellations to see the stars."

— Jack Gilbert, American poet, born 1925

"Look after goodness and truth, beauty will look after herself."

— Eric Gill, English typeface designer, born 1882

"They're not particular whether you're playing a flat 5th or a ruptured 129th as long as they can dance."

— Dizzy Gillespie, American trumpet player, born 1917

"These things I know: how the living go on living and how the dead go on living with them so that in a forest even a dead tree casts a shadow and the leaves fall one by one and the branches break in the wind and the bark peels off slowly and the trunk cracks and the rain seeps in through the cracks and the trunk fall to the ground and the moss covers it and in the spring the rabbits find it and build their nest inside the dead tree so that nothing is wasted in nature or in love."

— Laura Gilpin, American photographer, born 1950

"The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That's what poetry does."

— Allen Ginsberg, American poet, born 1926

"Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness."

— Allen Ginsberg, American poet, born 1926

"I believe that we are put here in human form to decipher the hieroglyphs of love and suffering. And, there is no degree of love or intensity of feeling that does not bring with it the possibility of a crippling hurt. But, it is a duty to take that risk and love without reserve or defense."

— Allen Ginsberg, American poet, born 1926

"America, why are your libraries full of tears?"

— Allen Ginsberg, American poet, born 1926

"This is a prayer, inchoate and unfinished, for you, my love, my loss, my lesion, a rosary of words to count out time's illusions, all the minutes, hours, days the calendar compounds as if the past existed somewhere like an inheritance still waiting to be claimed."

— Dana Gioia, American poet, born 1950

"What we conceal Is always more than what we dare confide. Think of the letters that we write our dead."

— Dana Gioia, American poet, born 1950

"Sadness flies on the wings of the morning and out of the heart of darkness comes the light."

— Jean Giraudoux, French novelist, born 1882

"Never get caught acting."

— Lillian Gish, American actress, died February 27, 1993