The Starry Night

"All I can do is be me, whoever that is."

"I had broken myself of the habit of thinking in short song cycles and began reading longer and longer poems to see if I could remember anything I read about in the beginning. I trained my mind to do this, had cast off gloomy habits and learned to settle myself down... I began cramming my brain with all kinds of deep poems. It seemed like I'd been pulling an empty wagon for a long time and now I was beginning to fill it up and would have to pull harder. I felt like I was coming out of the back pasture. I was changing in other ways, too. Things that used to affect me, didn't affect me anymore. I wasn’t too concerned about people, their motives. I didn’t feel the need to examine every stranger that approached."

"I've always been a person who likes to be alone. I don't feel lonely when I'm alone. I feel lonely when I'm with people. I'm a very private person. I don't like to talk about myself."

"You have to work out where your place is. And who you are. But we're all spirit. That's all we are, we're just walking dressed up in a suit of skin, and we're going to leave that behind."

"I ran away because I felt that parents want their kids to be like them, or to please them, to be what they want you to be. It’s a very difficult thing for a child to be himself. It’s much easier for him to be what his parents want him to be."

"There aren’t any finger-pointing songs in here... Those records I’ve already made, I’ll stand behind them, but some of that was jumping into the scene to be heard... From now on, I want to write from inside me... The way I like to write is for it to come out the way I walk or talk."

"My hangup was that I used to try to define beauty. I used to use adjectives like 'beautiful' and 'wonderful.' Then I read Hemingway, and he just said it. He didn't define it. He didn't use many adjectives. He just told you what happened. That's the way I want to write."

"I really didn't consider myself happy or unhappy. I always knew there was something out there I needed to get to. And it wasn't where I was at that particular moment."

"DESTINY is a feeling you have that you know something about yourself nobody else does. The picture you have in your own mind of what you’re about WILL COME TRUE. It’s a kind of a thing you kind of have to keep to your own self, because it’s a fragile feeling, and you put it out there, then someone will kill it. It’s best to keep that all inside."

"I kept running because I wasn't free. I was running for the sake of running, but it was a fake run. I finally got so far out I was cut off from everybody. I had no place to go, so I was no longer running. I was just there. And when I stopped running, I found I was free. Just because you’re free to move doesn't mean you're free."

Bob Dylan

“Where does it all lead? What will become of us? These were our young questions, and young answers were revealed. It leads to each other. We become ourselves.” ― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“I'm just a writer in the dark staring at the sconce which is the only survival in this vacant and abandoned house. I'm just a wildflower on fire with no trace of colors that made butterflies stop fluttering by me. I'm just a unsung musical phrase still obscure who knows what I'll be like. I'm just a void there is nothing within me maybe beyond the blackness there is a spark but it exist for what? I'm just a scar holding haunted memory of past everyone wants to get rid of me But who knew I'll come this far. I'm just an unmarked signpost I'll take you nowhere maybe there is something written on verso and you are on the wrong side.” - @CrippledRaven

IF a competition was held on this channel for poetry, what would you want as a winner?

"Daring to reach, to climb, to crawl, to scratch, to get back up when you've been knocked down, to push forward, ever forward... It means sacrificing everything, if necessary, to carve out a place for your own existence."

"You get your freedom by letting your enemy know that you'll do anything to get it. Then you'll get it. It's the only way you'll get it."

"We need to expand the civil-rights struggle to a higher level...to the level of human rights."

"The mental flexibility of the wise man permits him to keep an open mind and enables him to readjust himself whenever it becomes necessary for a change."

"So you're wasting your time appealing to the moral conscience of a bankrupt man... If he had a conscience, he'd straighten this thing out with no more pressure being put upon him... We have to change our own mind. You can't change his mind about us. We've got to change our own minds about each other."