E.E. Cummings: Thing

“The three saddest things are the ill wanting to be well, the poor wanting to be rich, and the constant traveler saying 'anywhere but here'.”

“I like my body when it is with your body. It is so quite new a thing. Muscles better and nerves more.”

“There are certain things in which one is unable to believe for the simple reason that he never ceases to feel them.”

“Simple people, people who don't exist, prefer things which don't exist,simple things.”

“since the thing perhaps is
to eat flowers and not to be afraid”

“You have played,
(I think)
And broke the toys you were fondest of,
And are a little tired now;
Tired of things that break, and—
Just tired.
So am I.”

“… remember one thing only: that it's you-nobody else-who determines your destiny and decides your fate. Nobody else can be alive for you; nor can you be alive for anybody else.”

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

“who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you”

“the mind is its own beautiful prisoner.
Mind looked long at the sticky moon
opening in dusk her new wings

then decently hanged himself, one afternoon.

The last thing he saw was you
naked amid unnaked things…”

“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.”

“If a poet is anybody, he is somebody to whom things made matter very little - somebody who is obsessed by Making.”

“somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence.
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you always open petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully, mysteriously)her first rose or if it be your wish to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly
as the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending; nothing we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries
rendering death and forever with each breathing”

“The first step to expanding your reality is to discard the tendency to exclude things from possibility.”

“things which in my mind blossom will
stumble beneath a clumsiest disguise appear
capable of fragility and indecision”

“because it's Spring
thingS dare to do people”

“The one…thing which mattered about any poem (so ran my second poetic period's credo) was what the poem said; it's socalled meaning … Thus it will be seen that, by the year 1900, one growing American boy had reached exactly that stage of "intellectual development" beyond which every ungrowing Marxist adult of today is strictly forbidden … ever to pass.”

“Simple people, people who don't exist, prefer things which don't exist, simple things.
"Good" and "bad" are simple things. You bomb me = "bad." I bomb you = "good."”

“milly befriended a stranded star
whose rays five languid fingers were;

and molly was chased by a horrible thing
which raced sideways while blowing bubbles:and

may came home with a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone

for whatever we lose (like a you or a me)
it's always ourselves we find in the sea”