Top 15 Richard Wilbur Quotes

What is the opposite of two?
A lonely me, a lonely you.

Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with angels.

Odd that a thing is most itself when likened

Writing poetry is talking to oneself; yet it is a mode of talking to oneself in which the self disappears; and the product's something that, though it may not be for everybody, is about everybody.

All that we do is touched with ocean, and yet we remain on the shore of what we know

It is always a matter, my darling,
Of life or death, as I had forgotten. I wish
What I wished you before, but harder.

Teach me, like you, to drink creation whole/ And casting out myself, become a soul.

If the king had given me for my own
Paris, his citadel,
And I for that must leave alone
Her whom I love so well,
I'd say then to the Crown
Take back your glittering town
My darling is more fair, I swear.
My darling is more fair.

Step off assuredly into the blank of your own mind. Something will come to you. Although at first You nod through nothing like a fogbound prow, Gravel will breed in the margins of your gaze

A thrush, because I'd been wrong,
Burst rightly into song
In a world not vague,
not lonely,
Not governed by me only.

the beautiful changes
In such kind ways,
Wishing ever to sunder
Things and things’ selves for a second finding, to lose
For a moment all that it touches back to wonder.

Now winter downs the dying of the year,
And night is all a settlement of snow;
From the soft street the rooms of houses show
A gathered light, a shapen atmosphere,
Like frozen-over lakes whose ice is thin
And still allows some stirring down within.

I die of thirst here at the fountainside.

As a queen sits down, knowing that a chair will be there,
Or a general raises his hand and is given the field-glasses,
Step off assuredly into the blank of your mind.
Something will come to you.

Young as she is, the stuff / Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy: / I wish her a lucky passage.