Galway Kinnell Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“...it is necessary to reteach a thing its loveliness, to put a hand on its brow of the flower and retell it in words and in touch it is lovely until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing...”
-- Galway Kinnell -
“Never mind. The self is the least of it. Let our scars fall in love.”
-- Galway Kinnell -
“Sometimes it is necessary To reteach a thing its loveliness”
-- Galway Kinnell -
“Perhaps poetry will be the canary in the mine-shaft warning us of what's to come.”
-- Galway Kinnell -
“Thats the way it is with poetry: When it is incomprehensible it seems profound, and when you understand it, it is only ridiculous.”
-- Galway Kinnell -
“I have always intended to live forever; but not until now, to live now.”
-- Galway Kinnell -
“To me, poetry is somebody standing up, so to speak, and saying, with as little concealment as possible, what it is for him or her to be on earth at this moment”
-- Galway Kinnell -
“Goodbye, you who are, for me, the postmarks again of shattered towns--Xenia, Burnt Cabins, Hornell-- their loneliness given away in poems, only their solitude kept.”
-- Galway Kinnell -
“this one whom habit of memory propels to the ground of his making, sleeper only the mortal sounds can sing awake, this blessing love gives again into our arms.”
-- Galway Kinnell -
“the rest of my days I spend wandering: wondering what, anyway, was that sticky infusion, that rank flavor of blood, that poetry, by which I lived?”
-- Galway Kinnell -
“The bud stands for all things, even for those things that don't flower”
-- Galway Kinnell -
“I will find that special person who is wrong for me in just the right way.”
-- Galway Kinnell -
“Go so deep into yourself, you speak for everyone.”
-- Galway Kinnell -
“The first step in the journey is to lose your way.”
-- Galway Kinnell -
“Kiss the mouth which tells you, here, here is the world. This mouth. This laughter. These temple bones.”
-- Galway Kinnell -
“I love to go out in late September among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries to eat blackberries for breakfast, the stalks very prickly, a penalty they earn for knowing the black art of blackberry-making; and as I stand among them lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries fall almost unbidden to my tongue, as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words like strengths or squinched, many-lettered, one-syllabled lumps, which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well in the silent, startled, icy, black language of blackberry - eating in late September.”
-- Galway Kinnell -
“Is there a mechanism of death, that so mutilates existence no one, gets over it not even the dead?”
-- Galway Kinnell -
“The only sense we still respect is eyesight, probably because it is so closely attached to the brain. Go into any American house at random, you will find something - a plastic flower, false tiles, some imitation something - something which can be appreciated as material only if apprehended by eyesight alone. Don't we go sightseeing in cars, thinking we can experience a landscape by looking at it through glass?”
-- Galway Kinnell -
“When I sleepwalk into your room, and pick you up, and hold you up in the moonlight, you cling to me hard, as if clinging could save us. I think you think I will never die, I think I exude to you the permanence of smoke or stars, even as my broken arms heal themselves around you.”
-- Galway Kinnell -
“Little sleep's-head sprouting hair in the moonlight, when I come back we will go out together, we will walk out together among, the ten thousand things, each scratched too late with such knowledge, the wages of dying is love.”
-- Galway Kinnell -
“There are two versions to every poem – the crying version and the straight version”
-- Galway Kinnell -
“Second-hand gloves will become lovely again, their memories are what give them the need for other hands. And the desolation of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness carved out of such tiny beings as we are asks to be filled; the need for the new love is faithfulness to the old.”
-- Galway Kinnell -
“Turn on the dream you lived through the unwavering gaze. It is as you thought: the living burn. In the floating days may you discover grace.”
-- Galway Kinnell -
“The first step... shall be to lose the way.”
-- Galway Kinnell
