James Richardson
American poet.
Hasn’t there … been a little too much zeal in our reproof of children and friends for yielding to the temptations we ourselves find it most difficult to resist? We punish where we can least afford to sympathize. Of all the horrors of the daily news, it seems hardest to imagine the kind of cruelty that is intensified by the pain of its victims, but whenever we feel sympathy would weaken us, we are a little closer to the torturer.
It is less important to escape pain than to avoid exceptionless rules.
Only the dead have discovered what they cannot live without.
Those who are too slow to be intelligent deserve our patience, those who are too quick, our pity.
The drives were nature’s first provision: thinking was added later, to get us around the world’s obstacles to them.
I sell my time to get enough money to buy it back.
I worked so hard to understand it that it must be true.
The new gets old much faster than the old gets older.
What did you do today? Nothing say our little children, and so do I. What we most are is what we keep mistaking for nothing.
Say too soon what you think and you will say what everyone else thinks.
Envy is ashamed of itself. If it weren’t hanging back, it would go all the way to emulation and love.
Easier to keep changing your life than to live it.
A strange gratitude for those I disagree with. They keep me from having to take too seriously the moments when I disagree with myself.
Value yourself according to the burdens you carry, and you will find everything a burden.
Seizing on a piece of business, I become tiny, eager, efficient: roiled water I cannot see into.
There is no road to the land without roads.
It is clear, we say, as if to see through something were to know it.
Birds of prey don’t sing.
Water deepens where it has to wait.
Happiness is the readiness to be happy.