Kathleen Raine

“The sacred is not in heaven or far away. It is all around us, and in us.”

“Imagination is the real and eternal world of which this vegetable universe is but a faint shadow.”

“The past is not a package one can lay away.”

“The days of my childhood were spent in a world of old ways and old beliefs.”

“Every soul is a wanderer.”

“Knowledge of the sacred is the object of all my strivings.”

“My desire was not for happiness. I did not consider that I had any right to it.”

“For we are all manifestations of the soul.”

“To write poetry is to be alive.”

“All learning is a form of remembering.”

“The gods are within us.”

“I had been born into a world of wonder.”

“It is the poet's business to cry from the rooftops what others whisper in their hearts.”

“Poetry is the language of the soul.”

“We do not choose our destinies. Yet we must receive them, and surely that is grace.”

“The soul's is an inner world, and the world of the soul is the real world.”

“What is learned in the womb is not forgotten.”

“A name is a prayer.”