Quotations

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by Emily Dickinson

Friday I tasted life. It was a vast morsel. A Circus passed the house—still I feel the red in my mind though the drums are out. The Lawn is full of south and the odors tangle, and I hear to-day for the first time the river in the tree.
—letter to Mrs. J. G. Holland

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?
—Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson

about Emily Dickinson

Almost nothing to do with Emily Dickinson is simple and clear-cut . . . .  Seemingly with willful cunning and surely with an artist's skill, she avoided direct answers to the major questions that anyone interested in her as a poet or person might have been moved to ask . . . .  She kept her private life private.  It is not that she said nothing about herself at any time; she said a great deal in nearly eighteen hundred poems and over a thousand letters.  But it is as if she lived out the advice she gave in her famous lines: 'Tell all the Truth but tell it slant -/Success in Circuit lies.' She avoided specifics, dodged direct confrontations, reserved commitments.  She told the truth, or an approximation of it, so metaphorically that scholars still grope for certainties.—Richard B. Sewall from The Life of Emily Dickinson

Emily, the quintessence and distillation of tthe Puritan spirit, poured out her pure nectar in rare and precious drops.—American Authors, 1600-1900

She was small, she was obstinate, she was not as wise as she ended by thinking herself; but her voice was unique, and she flung out the short cry of her gay or pain or mockery with a note that cannot be forgotten.—Percy Lubbock