E.E. Cummings: Quotes about love
E.E. Cummings was American poet. Explore interesting quotes on love.“Trust your heart if the seas catch fire, live by love though the stars walk backward.”
Variant: Trust your heart if the seas catch fire, live by love though the stars walk backwards.
A Foreword to Krazy (1946)
Context: A humbly poetic, gently clownlike, supremely innocent, and illimitably affectionate creature (slightly resembling a child's drawing of a cat, but gifted with the secret grace and obvious clumsiness of a penguin on terra firma) who is never so happy as when egoist-mouse, thwarting altruist-dog, hits her in the head with a brick. Dog hates mouse and worships "cat", mouse despises "cat" and hates dog, "cat" hates no one and loves mouse.
"being to timelessness as it's to time" (1958)
A Foreword to Krazy (1946)
Context: This hero and villain no more understand Krazy Kat than the mythical denizens of a two dimensional realm understand some three dimensional intruder. The world of Offissa Pupp and Ignatz Mouse is a knowledgeable power-world, in terms of which our unknowledgeable heroine is powerlessness personified. The sensical law of this world is might makes right; the nonsensical law of our heroine is love conquers all. To put the oak in the acorn: Ignatz Mouse and Offissa Pupp (each completely convinced that his own particular brand of might makes right) are simple-minded—Krazy isn't—therefore, to Offissa Pupp and Ignatz Mouse, Krazy is. But if both our hero and our villain don't and can't understand our heroine, each of them can and each of them does misunderstand her differently. To our softhearted altruist, she is the adorably helpless incarnation of saintliness. To our hardhearted egoist, she is the puzzlingly indestructible embodiment of idiocy. The benevolent overdog sees her as an inspired weakling. The malevolent undermouse views her as a born target. Meanwhile Krazy Kat, through this double misunderstanding, fulfills her joyous destiny.
“Love is the whole and more than all.”
Source: 100 Selected Poems
“yes is a pleasant country…
love is a deeper season
than reason”
Source: 1 x 1 (1944), XXXVIII
Source: Selected Poems
Source: Complete Poems, 1904-1962
“Always it’s Spring)and everyone’s in love and flowers pick themselves.”
Source: 100 Selected Poems
“All in green went my love riding
on a great horse of gold
into the silver dawn.”
Tulips and Chimneys (1923) IV
Essay in the anthology The War Poets (1945) edited by Oscar Williams