E.E. Cummings: Living

E.E. Cummings was American poet. Explore interesting quotes on living.
E.E. Cummings: 416 quotes35 likes

“in time of daffodils(who know
the goal of living is to grow)
forgetting why, remember how

in time of lilacs who proclaim
the aim of waking is to dream,
remember so(forgetting seem)

in time of roses(who amaze
our now and here with paradise)
forgetting if, remember yes

in time of all sweet things beyond
whatever mind may comprehend,
remember seek(forgetting find)

and in a mystery to be
(when time from time shall set us free)
forgetting me, remember me”

E.E. Cummings

“Trust your heart if the seas catch fire, live by love though the stars walk backward.”

E.E. Cummings

Variant: Trust your heart if the seas catch fire, live by love though the stars walk backwards.

“twice I have lived forever in a smile”

E.E. Cummings

“Your head is a living forest full of songbirds.”

E.E. Cummings

“Love is a place
& through this place of
love move
(with brightness of peace)
all places

yes is a world
& in this world of yes live
(skillfully curled)
all worlds”

E.E. Cummings

“i imagine that yes is the only living thing.”

E.E. Cummings

“(existing's tricky:but to live's a gift)”

E.E. Cummings

Source: Selected Poems

“you shall above all things be glad and young
For if you're young, whatever life you wear

it will become you; and if you are glad
whatever's living will yourself become.”

E.E. Cummings

“Before leaving my room
i turn, and (stooping
through the morning) kiss
this pillow, dear
where our heads lived and were.”

E.E. Cummings

“it's love by whom (my beautiful friend) the gift to live is without until:
…love was and shall be this only truth (a dream of a deed, born not to die)”

E.E. Cummings

4
73 poems (1963)

“true lovers in each happening of their hearts
live longer than all which and every who;”

E.E. Cummings book 1 × 1

Source: 1 x 1 (1944), XXXVI

“So, ungentle reader, (as you and I value what we should ashamed—after witnessing a few minor circus-marvels—to call our "lives,") let us never be fooled into taking seriously that perfectly superficial distinction which is vulgarly drawn between the circus-show and "art" or "the arts." Let us not forget that every authentic "work of art" is in and of itself alive and that, however "the arts" may differ among themselves, their common function is the expression of that supreme alive-ness which is known as "beauty." This being so, our three ring circus is art—for to contend that the spectacle in question is not an authentic manifestation of "beauty" is as childish, as to dismiss the circus on the ground that it is "childish," is idiotic.”

E.E. Cummings

"The Adult, the Artist and the Circus." Vanity Fair (October 1925)

“the cunning the craven
… they live for until
though the sun in his heaven
says Now”

E.E. Cummings

29
73 poems (1963)

“and nothing quite so least as truth
—i say though hate were why men breathe—
because my father lived his soul
love is the whole and more than all”

E.E. Cummings

34
50 Poems (1940)

“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."”

E.E. Cummings

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.
Re Ezra Pound (p. 69)
i : six nonlectures (1953)

“So, ungentle reader, (as you and I value what we should ashamed—after witnessing a few minor circus-marvels—to call our "lives,") let us never be fooled into taking seriously that perfectly superficial distinction which is vulgarly drawn between the circus-show and "art" or "the arts." Let us not forget that every authentic "work of art" is in and of itself alive and that, however "the arts" may differ among themselves, their common function is the expression of that supreme alive-ness which is known as "beauty."”

E.E. Cummings

This being so, our three ring circus is art—for to contend that the spectacle in question is not an authentic manifestation of "beauty" is as childish, as to dismiss the circus on the ground that it is "childish," is idiotic.
"The Adult, the Artist and the Circus." Vanity Fair (October 1925)