Quotes by Edward Estlin (E. E.) Cummings

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An artist doesn't live in some geographical abstraction, superimposed on a part of this beautiful earth by the nonimagination of unanimals and dedicated to the proposition that massacre is a social virtue because murder is an individual vice. Nor does an artist live in some soi-disant world, nor does he live in some so-called universe, nor does he live in any number of "worlds" or in any number of "universes." As for a few trifling delusions like the "past" and "present" and "future" of quote mankind unquote, they may be big enough for a couple of billion supermechanized submorons but they're much too small for one human being.

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I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing, than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance.

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Love is the every only God.

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My advice to all young people who wish to become poets is: do something easy, like learning how to blow up the world, unless you're not only willing, but glad, to feel and work and fight till you die. Does this sound dismal? It isn't. It's the most wonderful life on earth. Or so I feel.

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When you confuse art with propaganda, you confuse an act of God with something which can be turned on and off like the hot water faucet. If "God" means nothing to you (or less than nothing)I'll cheerfully substitute one of your own favorite words, "freedom". You confuse freedom, the only freedom, with absolute tyranny.
All over this socalled world, hundreds of millions of servile and insolent inhuman unbeings are busily unrolling in the enlightenment of propaganda.

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There are still a few erect human beings in the socalled world. Proudly and humbly, I say to these human beings:
"O my fellow citizens, many an honest man believes a lie. Though you are as honest as the day, fear and hate the liar. Fear and hate him when he should be feared and hated: now"

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Nothing is quite as easy as using words like somebody else. We all of us do exactly this nearly all of the time, and whenever we do it, we are not poets.

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It's spring when the world is puddle-wonderful.

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I who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday.

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A distinct throat. Which breathes. A head: small, smaller than a flower. With eyes and with lips. Lips more slender than light; a smile how carefully and slowly made, a smile made entirely of dream. Eyes deeper than Spring. Eyes darker than Spring, more new. These, these are the further miracles, the breasts. Thighs. The All which is beyond comprehension — the All which is perpetually discovered, yet undiscovered: sexual, sweet, Alive!