Stanley Kunitz Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“The universe is a continuous web. Touch it at any point and the whole web quivers.”
-- Stanley Kunitz -
“I can hardly wait for tomorrow, it means a new life for me each and every day.”
-- Stanley Kunitz -
“We have to learn how to live with our frailties. The best people I know are inadequate and unashamed.”
-- Stanley Kunitz -
“When you look back on a lifetime and think of what has been given to the world by your presence, your fugitive presence, inevitably you think of your art, whatever it may be, as the gift you have made to the world in acknowledgment of the gift you have been given, which is the life itself... That work is not an expression of the desire for praise or recognition, or prizes, but the deepest manifestation of your gratitiude for the gift of life.”
-- Stanley Kunitz -
“Be what you are. Give What is yours to give. Have Style. Dare.”
-- Stanley Kunitz -
“You must be careful not to deprive the poem of its wild origin.”
-- Stanley Kunitz -
“Deftly they opened the brain of a child, and it was full of flying dreams.”
-- Stanley Kunitz -
“Poetry is ultimately mythology, the telling of stories of the soul. The old myths, the old gods, the old heroes have never died. They are only sleeping at the bottom of our minds, waiting for our call. We have need of them, for in their sum they epitomize the wisdom and experience of the race.”
-- Stanley Kunitz -
“Rhythm to me is essentially what Hopkins called the taste of self. I taste myself as rhythm.”
-- Stanley Kunitz -
“A poem has secrets that the poet knows nothing of.”
-- Stanley Kunitz -
“When they shall paint our sockets gray And light us like a stinking fuse, Remember that we once could say, Yesterday we had a world to lose.”
-- Stanley Kunitz -
“The poem in the head is always perfect. Resistance begins when you try to convert it into language.”
-- Stanley Kunitz -
“How shall the heart be reconciled / To its feast of losses?”
-- Stanley Kunitz -
“I associate the garden with the whole experience of being alive, and so, there is nothing in the range of human experience that is separate from what the garden can signify in its eagerness and its insistence, and in its driving energy to live -- to grow, to bear fruit.”
-- Stanley Kunitz -
“Certainly the modern poets I cherish most are disturbing spirits; they do not come to coo.”
-- Stanley Kunitz -
“It is my heart that's late, it is my song that's flown.”
-- Stanley Kunitz -
“I dance/for the joy of surviving, at the edge of the road.”
-- Stanley Kunitz -
“I like an ending that's both a door and a window.”
-- Stanley Kunitz -
“Poetry is language surprised in the act of changing into meaning.”
-- Stanley Kunitz -
“The supreme morality of art is to endure.”
-- Stanley Kunitz -
“I refuse to turn to theology to justify the life or redeem it. There is a question always of the connection to the eternal. I say to myself above all, keep alive your conviction that there are sacred elements in the life in the practice of the life that must be respected. But the conviction in the existence of the sacred does not necessarily imply that you need to believe in a creator, because we are the ones that made the sacred.”
-- Stanley Kunitz -
“Poetry today is easier to write but harder to remember.”
-- Stanley Kunitz -
“A poet needs to keep his wilderness alive inside him.”
-- Stanley Kunitz -
“The first task of the poet is to create the person who will write the poems.”
-- Stanley Kunitz -
“What makes the engine go? Desire, desire, desire.”
-- Stanley Kunitz -
“In my darkest night, when the moon was covered and I roamed through wreckage, a nimbus-clouded voice directed me: "Live in the layers,not on the litter." Though I lack the art to decipher it. no doubt the next chapter in my book of transformations is already written. I am not done with my changes”
-- Stanley Kunitz
