27 Quotes by Sam Hamill

Nothing will change until we demolish the “we-they” mentality. We are human, and therefore all human concerns are ours. And those concerns are personal.

We’re certainly not perfect, and we’re not probably even better than anybody else, except that perhaps we are given to certain kinds of contemplation that provide a valuable balance to the knee-jerk reactionary behavior of most of our newspapers and political leaders. Poets are great doubters.

If only we could touch the things of this world at their center, if we could only hear tiny leaves of birch struggling toward April, then we would know.

I think a lot of American poets are swimming-pool Soviets. A lot of them have taken the comfortable, self-protective route too often. I know that I certainly have. That’s easy to do.

I’m a poet who practices Zen. And it’s not, I’m somebody who practices Zen who writes poetry. There’s no separation for me.

I would say that my great political awakening was really born on Okinawa, reading Albert Camus: the “Neither Victims nor Executioners” essay and The Rebel. I was an eighteen-year-old kid. I hated myself. I hated my life. I thought nobody wanted me.

Each of us as poets, as decent suffering human beings, has to find a way to run our lives that is compassionate toward one another and toward our environment.

With dewdrops dripping, I wish somehow I could wash this perishing world.

In pale moonlight the wisteria’s scent comes from far away.