e. e. cummings famous quotes
Last updated: Jul 22, 2024
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I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing than to teach ten thousand stars how not to dance.
-- e. e. cummings -
To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.
-- e. e. cummings -
I imagine that yes is the only living thing.
-- e. e. cummings -
Once we believe in ourselves, we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight, or any experience that reveals the human spirit.
-- e. e. cummings -
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Trust your heart if the seas catch fire, live by love though the stars walk backward.
-- e. e. cummings -
The snow doesn't give a soft white damn whom it touches.
-- e. e. cummings -
It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.
-- e. e. cummings -
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Yours is the light by which my spirit's born: - you are my sun, my moon, and all my stars.
-- e. e. cummings -
Whenever you think or you believe or you know, you're a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you're nobody-but-yourself.
-- e. e. cummings -
Someone asked me what home was and all I could think of were the stars on the tip of your tongue, the flowers sprouting from your mouth, the roots entwined in the gaps between your fingers, the ocean echoing inside of your ribcage.
-- e. e. cummings -
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For whatever we lose (like a you or a me), It's always our self we find in the sea.
-- e. e. cummings -
Unless you love someone, nothing else makes any sense.
-- e. e. cummings -
may my heart always be open to little birds who are the secrets of living
-- e. e. cummings -
somewhere i have never traveled, gladly beyond any experience, your eyes have their silence; in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me, or which i cannot touch because they are too near
-- e. e. cummings -
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Listen; there's a hell of a good universe next door: let's go.
-- e. e. cummings -
There are certain things in which one is unable to believe for the simple reason that he never ceases to feel them. Things of this sort - things which are always inside of us and in fact are us and which consequently will not be pushed off or away where we can begin thinking about them - are no longer things; they, and the us which they are, equals A Verb; an IS.
-- e. e. cummings -
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most people are perfectly afraid of silence
-- e. e. cummings -
a salesman is an it that stinks to please but whether to please itself or someone else makes no more difference than if it sells hate condoms education snakeoil vac uumcleaners terror strawberries democ ra(caveat emptor)cy superfluous hair
-- e. e. cummings -
If 180 million people want to be undead, that’s their funeral, but I happen to like being alive.
-- e. e. cummings -
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The hardest challenge is to be yourself in a world where everyone is trying to make you be somebody else.
-- e. e. cummings -
...remember one thing only: that it's you-nobody else-who determines your destiny and decides your fate. Nobody else can be alive for you; nor can you be alive for anybody else.
-- e. e. cummings -
Exists no miracle mightier than this: to feel.
-- e. e. cummings -
The first step to expanding your reality is to discard the tendency to exclude things from possibility.
-- e. e. cummings -
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his lips drink water but his heart drinks wine
-- e. e. cummings -
The Symbol of all Art is the Prism. The goal is destructive. To break up the white light of objective realism into the secret glories it contains.
-- e. e. cummings -
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And now you are and I am and we're a mystery which will never happen again.
-- e. e. cummings -
notice the convulsed orange inch of moon perching on this silver minute of evening
-- e. e. cummings -
i thank You God for most this amazing day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything which is natural which is infinite which is yes (i who have died am alive again today, and this is the sun's birthday; this is the birth day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay great happening illimitably earth) how should tasting touching hearing seeing breathing any--lifted from the no of all nothing--human merely being doubt unimaginable You? (now the ears of my ears awake and now the eyes of my eyes are opened)
-- e. e. cummings -
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Well, write poetry, for God's sake, it's the only thing that matters.
-- e. e. cummings -
may I be I is the only prayer--not may I be great or good or beautiful or wise or strong.
-- e. e. cummings -
A politician is an arse upon which everyone has sat except a man.
-- e. e. cummings -
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Be of love a little more careful than of anything.
-- e. e. cummings -
We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us something is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch. Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or any experience that reveals the human spirit.
-- e. e. cummings -
The world is mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful.
-- e. e. cummings -
I thank you God for this most amazing day, for the leaping greenly spirits of trees, and for the blue dream of sky and for everything which is natural, which is infinite, which is yes.
-- e. e. cummings -
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nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands
-- e. e. cummings -
A wind has blown the rain away and blown the sky away and all the leaves away, and the trees stand. I think, I too, have known autumn too long.
-- e. e. cummings -
America makes prodigious mistakes, America has colossal faults, but one thing cannot be denied: America is always on the move. She may be going to Hell, of course, but at least she isn't standing still.
-- e. e. cummings -
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To destroy is always the first step in any creation.
-- e. e. cummings -
I like my body when it is with your body. It is so quite new a thing. Muscles better and nerves more.
-- e. e. cummings -
Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question.
-- e. e. cummings -
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life's not a paragraph And death i think is no parenthesis
-- e. e. cummings -
I'm living so far beyond my income that we may almost be said to be living apart.
-- e. e. cummings -
Humanity I love you because when you're hard up you pawn your intelligence to buy a drink.
-- e. e. cummings -
Your head is a living forest full of songbirds.
-- e. e. cummings -
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The artist is not a man who describes, but a man who feels.
-- e. e. cummings -
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses
-- e. e. cummings -
You have played, (I think) And broke the toys you were fondest of, And are a little tired now; Tired of things that break, and— Just tired. So am I.
-- e. e. cummings -
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Knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination.
-- e. e. cummings -
Love is the voice under all silences, the hope which has no opposite in fear. . .
-- e. e. cummings -
The most wasted of all days is one without laughter.
-- e. e. cummings -
Love is the voice under all silences, the hope which has no opposite in fear; the strength so strong mere force is feebleness: the truth more first than sun, more last than star...
-- e. e. cummings -
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You are my sun, my moon, and all my stars.
-- e. e. cummings -
I am someone who proudly and humbly affirms that love is the mystery-of-mysteries, and that nothing measurable matters 'a very good God damn'; that 'an artist, a man, a failure' is no mere whenfully accreting mechanism, but a givingly eternal complexity-neither some soulless and heartless ultrapredatory infra-animal nor any understandingly knowing and believing and thinking automaton, but a naturally and miraculously whole human being-a feelingly illimitable individual; whose only happiness is to transcend himself, whose every agony is to grow.
-- e. e. cummings -
One's not half of two; two are halves of one.
-- e. e. cummings -
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The three saddest things are the ill wanting to be well, the poor wanting to be rich, and the constant traveler saying 'anywhere but here'.
-- e. e. cummings -
You and I are more than you and I because it's we.
-- e. e. cummings -
Such was a poet and shall be and is -who'll solve the depths of horror to defend a sunbeam's architecture with his life: and carve immortal jungles of despair to hold a mountain's heartbeat in his hand.
-- e. e. cummings -
Sweet springtime is my time is your time is our time for springtime is love time and viva sweet love.
-- e. e. cummings -
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It may take two people to make a really beautiful mistake.
-- e. e. cummings -
It is with roses and locomotives (not to mention acrobats Spring electricity Coney Island the 4th of July the eyes of mice and Niagara Falls) that my poems are competing.
-- e. e. cummings -
i have found what you are like the rain (Who feathers frightened fields with the superior dust-of-sleep. wields easily the pale club of the wind and swirled justly souls of flower strike the air in utterable coolness deeds of gren thrilling light with thinned newfragile yellows lurch and.press --in the woods which stutter and sing And the coolness of your smile is stirringofbirds between my arms;but i should rather than anything have(almost when hugeness will shut quietly)almost, your kiss
-- e. e. cummings -
mr youse needn't be so spry concernin questions arty each has his tastes but as for i i likes a certain party gimme the he-man's solid bliss for youse ideas i'll match youse a pretty girl who naked is is worth a million statues
-- e. e. cummings -
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and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant and whatever a sun will always sing is you
-- e. e. cummings -
What if a dawn of a doom of a dream bites this universe in two, peels forever out of his grave, and sprinkles nowhere with me and you?
-- e. e. cummings
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