"To be a poet is a condition, not a profession."

Lately, I've realized that I've become a person whose constant exterior battles have outweighed what I consider to be the most important battle one will ever fight. I have lost the overbearing need to chafe away at my thoughts and values until I am left with a raw form of self wholly fit to criticize and reflect upon. I have lost the sense of urgency in my chase to improve and more fully understand what I have found to be "me" and I've come to realize that it is solely due to my lack of writing lately.

Therefore, I feel like it is more important than anything else to restablish both my appreciation for literature and my own application of this expansion of the written word into my own writings. The following quotes have truly sculpted my reliance on poetry and prose, or at least clarified my assertions of it. I'm not quite a "poet" yet (although I pretend to be one), but these quotes revive all faith I have in becoming one. I'm only posting this on Facebook and Blogspot to remind myself that I CAN'T BACK DOWN and downplay writing's significance in my life, especially now that I've publicly declared it. Also, I know there are so many of you who understand the introspective power of literature and need the reminder as much as I do, or who might need the push to see beyond the intellectual and into the emotional.

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Poets are soldiers that liberate words from the steadfast possession of definition.
- Eli Khamarov

"I've been know to say, 'Oh yes, I do want to be in love. And yes I do want to be a loving, loving person. And yes I do want to be the mother of many children.' But at the same time, there is part of me that says 'I am also Lillian Hellman and I want to write the great novel of all time.' I want to go on the beach with my silent typewriter and I don't want anybody to bother me... because I want to enhance this planet. I came here for a reason. I didn't come here to be a mother. I didn't come here to be a nun. And I did not come here to be a cleaning lady. I came here to be a poet."
- Stevie Nicks, 1983

"Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings with form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves."
- T.S. Eliot

"Poetry is all which gets lost in translation."
- Robert Frost

"A poet is an unhappy being whose heart is torn by secret sufferings, but whose lips are so strangely formed that when the sighs and the cries escape them, they sound like beautiful music... and then people crowd about the poet and say to him: 'Sing for us soon again;' that is as much as to say, 'may new sufferings torment your soul.'"
-Soren Kierkegaard

"We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race and the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for."
- Dead Poet's Society

A poet must leave traces of his passage, not proof.
- Rene Char