Gwendolyn Brooks, We Real Cool

THE POOL PLAYERS. 
SEVEN AT THE GOLDEN SHOVEL.

We real cool. We
Left school. We

Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We
Die soon.

Sharon Olds

I was a late bloomer.
But anyone who blooms at all, ever, is very lucky.

Rosemary Hill reviewing Mark Dery’s biography of Edward Gorey

Some fans who wrote to him got a postcard saying 'You've written to me to no avail/Because I never read my mail'; others didn't. When he read that Carol Burnett answered all her fan letters he was aghast. 'This isn't possible! Are you insane? Have you no priorities?!'

Adrienne Rich, “Transcendental Etudes”

No one ever told us we had to study our lives,
make of our lives a study, as if learning natural history
or music, that we should begin
with the simple exercises first
and slowly go on trying
the hard ones, practicing till strength
and accuracy became one with the daring
to leap into transcendence, take the chance
of breaking down the wild arpeggio
or faulting the full sentence of the fugue.
–And in fact we can't live like that: we take on
everything at once before we've even begun
to read or mark time, we're forced to begin
in the midst of the hard movement,
the one already sounding as we are born.

Jorge Luis Borges, Twenty Conversations with Borges, Including a Selection of Poems

A writer — and, I believe, generally all persons — must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely.