The beauty of the poetry of Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) shines through the years as brightly as the symbolic white clothing that she liked to wear.

"Dwell in possibility," she said.

Called "the New England mystic," she seldom ventured out of her Amherst, Massachusetts home and garden. "I never had to go anywhere to find my paradise," she observed.

Year after year she wrote, on scraps of paper and backs of envelopes, 1,775 "little poems," she described, "tied together with twine in sixty little bundles." In one year, she wrote 364 poems. She created, experimented, for her own pleasure, not to be published.

"Publication is the auction of the mind," she reflected in a letter. Only seven poems were published in her lifetime, anonymously.

"That love is all there is is all we know of love," she shared.

The sensitive writer celebrated originality and used vibrant language to explore the heart and human condition. She celebrated nature in beautiful verse, catching miracles in the simplicity of daily life.

Waiting, watchfully, with hope, she wrote: "Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door."

More Emily DICKINSON Quotations

There is ecstasy in living. To catch the dawn, open every door.