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Poetry and imagination begin life. A child will fall on its knees on the gravel walk at the sight of a pink hawthorn in full flower, when it is by itself, to praise God for it.

 

Florence Nightingale

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I shall not find a painting more beautiful because the artist has painted a hawthorn in the foreground, though I know of nothing more beautiful than the hawthorn, for I wish to remain sincere and because I know that the beauty of a painting does not depend on the things represented in it. I shall not collect images of hawthorn. I do not venerate hawthorn, I go to see and smell it.

 

Marcel Proust

 

On this seat — where she came to me for the first time, which was once so important to us that it seemed as if the background of things all about us had been created by us — we sit down to-day, after we have vainly sought in nature the traces of our transit.
The landscape is peaceful, simple, empty; it fills us with a great quivering. Marie is so sad and so simple that you can see her thought.
I have leaned forward, my elbows on my knees. I have contemplated the gravel at my feet; and suddenly I start, for I understand that my eyes were looking for the marks of our footsteps, in spite of the stone, in spite of the sand.
After the solemnity of a long silence, Marie's face takes on a look of defeat, and suddenly she begins to cry. The tears which fill her — for one always weeps in full, drop on to her knees. And through her sobs there fall from her wet lips words almost shapeless, but desperate and fierce, as a burst of forced laughter.
"It's all over!" she cries.

 

Henri Barbusse

 

The appeal to heaven breaks off.
The petals begin to fall, in self-forgiveness.
It is a flower. On this mountainside it is dying.

 

Galway Kinnell

 

I can write about prayer, you can read about prayer...but sooner or later you have to fall to your knees and just plain pray. Then, and only then, will you begin to operate in the vein of God's miracle-working ways.

 

Bill Hybels

 

In time of the crises of the spirit, we are aware of all of need, our need for each other and our need for ourselves. We call up our fullness; we turn, and act. We begin to be aware of correspondences, of the acknowledgement in us of necessity, and of the lands.
And poetry, among all this — where is there a place for poetry?
If poetry as it comes to us through action were all we had, it would be very much. For the dense and crucial moments, spoken under the stress of realization, full-bodied and compelling in their imagery, arrive with music, with our many kinds of theatre, and in the great prose. If we had these only, we would be open to the same influences, however diluted and applied. For these ways in which poetry reaches past the barriers set up by our culture, reaching toward those who refuse it in essential presence, are various, many-meaning, and certainly — in this period — more acceptable. They stand in the same relation to poetry as applied science to pure science.

 

Muriel Rukeyser