John Geddes

“...the answer is not in the damn blank page - it's in the days or years before and you have to dredge it up - exhume the past again ...”

“...spiritual or emotional pain doesn't become a memory so much as a bruise ...”

“...there's an impotency Viagra can't touch - the inability of a man to speak ...”

“...we use intimacy to refer to the physical when it really pertains to the spiritual ..”

“the abyss you stare into and that stares back at you is your reflection in the mirror - we all have it - that shadow self - that dark heart...”

“...you can use words if you wish, but I'm warning you - I've learned how to read your heart ...”

“...yes, I wrote that for you, who can't sort out lie from lay no matter how often I explain it - crayons and perfume - you still don't get it ...”

“... my early writing was a silent fury - at what or whom, I had no idea - but I shut it in until it burned my bones and now, I've let it out...”

“...some say Twitter seems trite and lacks weightiness - but in actuality, it lends itself to poetry - it can be very compressed and intense...”

“...writing with ferocity is a gift, provided that ferocity is a monomaniacal devotion to pursuing the truth ...”

“...futility is being sorry while doing nothing to remove the cause ...”

“...The heart mourns people and places and returns to them in dreams...”

“...you've lost perspective? Well, get it back - God alone has the third person point of view in this life ...”

“...a dream isn't a wish - it's an altered state of consciousness ...”

“...in my dream the shadings of your soul are the dark tincture of rain...”

“...these vignettes I sketch for you - what are they? watercolors ..yes and dreams blurred with tears ...”

“...the wet brush of snowflakes was like your kisses everywhere ...”

“...I've decided ... love is an eternity of slow motion replays ...”

“...in India ink your writing is lovely, but not as lovely as your hand - it is your hand - I know your hand - it fits so well in mine ...”

“...have I told you? - your eyes are a dark poem of dancing snow at midnight ...”

“...when you're hard and unyielding your words score me with lines - I hate lines - I want curves - curves are happy like a snowman ...”

“... yes I speak a different language - the dark fire of poetry - it flutters and gutters in tune with the mood...”

“...the feelings that pass between us are deeper than fleshly touches...”

“...a sensual life is a ghostly existence where you live on the surface and your soul passes through everything, touching nothing ...”

“...some writers closet themselves - I write wherever I am because that's where life is happening ...”

“...it's good to know wave and particle alpha code, but more than that, the writer must go to the heart of life ...”

“...you do violence with your words if you force them - art is given - the words received, moment by moment from unseen hands - call it a Muse ...”

“...language always occurs in a context - you can speak Elizabethan words, but to speak the language you have to put on the mindset...”

“...at seventeen I tried to write poetry confining myself solely to Anglo-Saxon words - don't know if it helped, but it made me more concrete ...”

“...the heart breaks in so many different ways that when it heals, it will have fault lines ...”

“...thinking about laughing with 2 yr old Findlay today - Dostoyevsky was right, “The soul is healed by being with children.” ...”

“...here's what I've learned - people will hurt you, but you don't have to respond - not every mean comment or cruel act deserves to be noticed ...”

“...take off your sweater in the darkness and static flares as a tiny lightning storm - I am the same at the end of your fingertips ...”

“...your memory is a warm stone hidden in my hand I'm always turning over...”

“...why is my cat a Muse? the cat has the rare grace of never saying a word too much― Mark Twain ...that's why ...”

“...I know Shakespeare said art is holding up a mirror to nature- but you're actually bending and refracting it through your interior dialogue ...”

“...there is a myth called objective reality - we think an impersonal world exists apart from us - it doesn't - it needs us to be ...”

“...time begins when we awaken and ends when we fall asleep...”

“...when you're a writer, you become deeper and more uniquely distinct, the more you go inside yourself...”

“...I make no apology about stirring the depths - every human longs to swim under water and see what lurks beneath ...”

“...the real junk food is what Frank Lloyd Wright called light entertainment - bubblegum for the eye ...”

“...don't settle for pap - our thoughts wander through eternity - experience the wonder of being alive...”

“...when you look at the stars, you should tremble - only dullards have become callous to this frisson ...”

“...it's not the medium that's the message - it's consciousness - the wonder of being able to wonder ...”

“...everyone wants to be excited by something magical and wondrous - to be reminded of how they once saw the world ...”

“... you are lovely - God has painted every feature of your soul ...”

“...if you always move in certainty, your writing will be flat - creativity is a rugged terrain...”

“...everything is gone except traces of you inside me - and the years like the wind are sweeping those away ...”

“...it's not the stories - it's the pain and the joy and the people who stay with you long after the stories are told ...”

“...if you don't regard your word as a sacred covenant, then there is nothing in you I can honor ...”