She said:

“If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.”

“The inner – what is it?

if not intensified sky, hurled through with birds

and deep with the winds of homecoming.”

- by Rainer Maria Rilke

“Drowsy god,
slow the wheels of my thought
so that I listen only
to the snowfall hush of
thy circling.”

written by Denise Levertov (exerpt from Hymn to Eros)

Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.

- Kahlil Gibran

From her poem, A Christmas Carol:

In The bleak mid-winter
Frosty winds made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron,
Water like a stone
Snow had fallen, snow on snow,
Snow on snow,
In the bleak mid-winter,
Long ago.

- Christina Rossetti

Written by Rilke (translated by C. F. MacIntyre):

Whoever you are, go out into the evening,
leaving your room, of which you know each bit;
your house is the last before the infinite,
whoever you are.
Then with your eyes that wearily
scarce lift themselves from the worn-out door-stone
slowly you raise a shadowy black tree
and fix it on the sky: slender, alone.
And you have made the world (and it shall grow
and ripen as a word, unspoken, still).
When you have grasped its meaning with your will,
then tenderly your eyes will let it go.

How like a winter hath my absence been

(Sonnet 97) by William Shakespeare

How like a winter hath my absence been

From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year!

What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen!

What old December’s bareness every where!

And yet this time remov’d was summer’s time;

The teeming autumn, big with rich increase,

Bearing the wanton burden of the prime,

Like widow’d wombs after their lords’ decease:

Yet this abundant issue seem’d to me

But hope of orphans and unfather’d fruit;

For summer and his pleasures wait on thee,

And, thou away, the very birds are mute:

Or, if they sing, ’tis with so dull a cheer,

That leaves look pale, dreading the winter’s near.

Writing is a solitary occupation. Family, friends, and society are the natural enemies of the writer. He must be alone, uninterrupted, and slightly savage if he is to sustain and complete an undertaking.

- Quotation by Jessamyn West

“Wake at dawn with a winged heart

and give thanks for another day of loving.”