Komunyakaa Poems Quotes & Sayings

I think of my poems as personal and public at the same time. You could say they serve as psychological overlays. One fits on top of the other, and hopefully there's an ongoing evolution of clarity. — Yusef Komunyakaa

It ain't that I'm too big to listen to the rumors, It's just that I'm too damn big to pay attention to 'em. — Dr. Dre

I witnessed so much death and dying that first year, it was sometimes hard to take. Every death challenged me to clarify my value system. How much should I defer to a patient's wishes regarding end-of-life care? How hard should I encourage him, as I had James Irey, to make what I thought were the right choices? How to balance a patient's autonomy with the competing ethical imperatives of beneficence or social responsibility? — Sandeep Jauhar

I want to reach as many people as possible with the message of music, of wonderful opera. — Luciano Pavarotti

It took me 14 years to write poems about Vietnam. I had never thought about writing about it, and in a way I had been systematically writing around it. — Yusef Komunyakaa

Kids need stuff which is different than what their life is that they can kind of live through. — Kathy Valentine

The car emitted on last gasp and rolled to a stop, in the middle of the Altlantic Ocean. "We're here," Leven tried to joke. — Obert Skye

I love being a woman. You can cry. You get to wear pants now. If you're on a boat and it's going to sink, you get to go on the rescue boat first. You get to wear cute clothes. It must be a great thing, or so many men wouldn't be wanting to do it. — Gilda Radner

I like connecting the abstract to the concrete. There's a tension in that. I believe the reader or listener should be able to enter the poem as a participant. So I try to get past resolving poems. — Yusef Komunyakaa

Are you certain they aren't?"
Rose looked for a delicate way to put it.
"Doing the horizontal mumbo?"
Tyler laughed at the look the other two women gave her.
This was her mother, after all. "Mother spent too many years with a man who treated her like crap. She was lonely even when she wasn't alone. If Doctor Yum-Yum could coax her into bed, I'd say more power to her and way to go, Mom! — Mary J. Williams