Explore Quotes by Kenneth Rexroth

This isn't the best town for what we're doing. Too many other things to pull the crowds away.

Mary, my little girl, was confirmed in a Buddhist temple. She saw the Life write up on Buddhism, with pictures of the ceremony, and she said she wanted to be confirmed there because she only liked Jesus as a kid. She was a little disappointed in him when he grew up.

I've had it with these cheap sons of bitches who claim they love poetry but never buy a book.

Art is the reasoned derangement of the senses.

Man thrives where angels would die of ecstasy and where pigs would die of disgust.

An entomologist is not a bug.

The meaning of life can be revealed but never explained.

It takes great labor to uncover the convincing simple speech of the heart. Poetic candor comes with hard labor, so even does impetuosity and impudence.

I've been around jazz and jazz musicians most of my life.

The basic line in any good verse is cadenced... building it around the natural breath structures of speech.

Against the ruin of the world, there is only one defense: the creative act.

Did you know I staged the first performance in America of At the Hawk's Well?

When the newspapers have got nothing else to talk about, they cut loose on the young. The young are always news. If they are up to something, that's news. If they aren't, that's news too.

Maturity is having the ability to escape categorization.

You don't become a saint until you lead a good life whether in Tibet or Italy or America.

A white crowned night sparrow sings as the moon sets. Thunder growls far off. Our campfire is a single light. Amongst a hundred peaks and waterfalls. The manifold voices of falling water Take all night. Wrapped in your down bag Starlight on you cheeks and eyelids Your breath comes and goes In a tiny cloud in the frosty night. Ten thousand birds sing in the sunrise. Ten thousand years revolve without change. All this will never be again.

The free, creative, loving people who shine so brightly in my memory of studios and coffee shops have become models for a huge section of the population. If they in turn can just stay alive in the face of power and terror, they may become the decisive section.

Now I know surely and forever,_x000D__x000D_However much I have blotted our_x000D__x000D_Waking love, its memory is still_x000D__x000D_there. And I know the web, the net,_x000D__x000D_The blind and crippled bird. For then, for_x000D__x000D_One brief instant it was not blind, nor_x000D__x000D_Trapped, not crippled. For one heart beat the_x000D__x000D_Heart was free and moved itself. O love,_x000D__x000D_I who am lost and damned with words,_x000D__x000D_Whose words are a business and an art,_x000D__x000D_I have no words. These words, this poem, this_x000D__x000D_Is all confusion and ignorance._x000D__x000D_But I know that coached by your sweet heart,_x000D__x000D_My heart beat one free beat and sent_x000D__x000D_Through all my flesh the blood of truth.

The holiness of the real_x000D__x000D_Is always there, accessible_x000D__x000D_In total immanence. The nodes_x000D__x000D_Of transcendence coagulate_x000D__x000D_In you, the experiencer,_x000D__x000D_And in the other, the lover.

Love is the garment of knowledge.

Crooked cards and straight whiskey, Slow horses and fast women.