Poetry comes with anger, hunger and dismay; it does not often visit groups of citizens sitting down to be literary together, and would appall them if it did. – Christopher Morley, John Mistletoe

As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mugs game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing. – T. S. Eliot

Happiness is sharing a bowl of cherries and a book of poetry with a shade tree. – Terri Guillemets, “From the Library to the Park,” 1993