Walt Whitman Quotes

Poetry is a rich, full-bodied whistle, cracked ice crunching in pails, the night that numbs the leaf, the duel of two nightingales, the sweet pea that has run wild, Creation's tears in shoulder blades.

There's no night without stars.

For 'The Gift of Stones,' I spent an afternoon chasing a flock of Canadian geese.

Not the cry, but the flight of the wild duck, leads the flock to fly and follow.

Everything move...you wonder how it all knows where to go. Einstein wondered how birds knew where to migrate to. He thought they might follow lines of light in the sky. He saw everything as lines of light. That's how he was built. So we don't know how he moved, either. Any more than the birds.

The sound universe is also spectacular around here. In the evenings there's a cricket orchestra with frogs providing the bass line. In the dead of night the dogs howl about how misunderstood they are. Before dawn the roosters for miles around announce how freaking cool it is to be roosters.

I'm going to sound a little weird here, but I like to spend a lot of time on my own in the woods. I don't exactly sneak off in the middle of the night, but I like to be in a place where no one can reach me by phone or e-mail.

Human beings any one of us, and our species as a whole are not all-important, not at the center of the world. That is the one essential piece of information, the one great secret, offered by any encounter with the woods or the mountains or the ocean or any wilderness or chunk of nature or patch of night sky.

That night the wind was howling almost like a wolf and there were some real wolves off to the west giving it lessons.

The old pond, ah! A frog jumps in: The water's sound.

The sky slowly pulled up its blue dress to reveal night.

A pilot's business is with the wind, and with the stars, with night, with sand, with the sea. He strives to outwit the forces of nature. He stares with expectancy for the coming of the dawn the way a gardener awaits the coming of spring. He looks forward to port as a promised land, and truth for him is what lives in the stars.

Ravens bring things to people. We're like that. It's our nature. We don't like it.

Can you not see the numerous designs made by God as signs, similitudes, or analogies of resurrection? He has placed them in every era, the alteration of day and night, even in the coming and going of clouds.

Triumphal arch, that fill'st the sky When storms prepare to part, I ask not proud Philosophy To teach me what thou art.

O mysterious Night! thou art not silent; many tongues halt thou.

Sound loves to revel in a summer night.

Dead sounds at night come from the inmost hills. Like footsteps upon wool.

The only authority I respect is the one that causes butterflies to fly south in fall and north in springtime.

When we are alone on a starlit night, when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers to rest and eat; when we see children in a moment when they are really children.

December stillness, teach me through your trees That loom along the west, one with the land, The veiled evangel of your mysteries. While nightfall, sad and spacious, on the down Deepens, and dusk embues me where I stand, With grave diminishings of green and brown, Speak, roofless Nature, your instinctive words; And let me learn your secret from the sky, Following a flock of steadfast-journeying birds In lone remote migration beating by. December stillness, crossed by twilight roads, Teach me to travel far and bear my loads.

Cats are the wildest of the tame and the tamest of the wild

Our health is our sound relation to external objects; our sympathy with external being.

These stars of earth, these golden flowers.