Stanley Kunitz Quotes - Page 2

Deftly they opened the brain of a child, and it was full of flying dreams.

I dance/for the joy of surviving, at the edge of the road.

The unconscious creates, the ego edits.

The supreme morality of art is to endure.

The ear writes my poems, not the mind.

Writer's block is a natural affliction. Writers who have never experienced it have something wrong with them. It means there isn't enough friction-that they aren't making enough of an effort to reconcile the contradictions of life. All you get is sweet monotonous flow. Writer's block is nothing to commit suicide over. It simply indicates some imbalance between your experience and your art, and I think that's constructive.

Some poems present themselves as cliffs that need to be climbed. Others are so defensive that when you approach their enclosure you half expect to be met by a snarling dog at the gate. Still others want to smother you with their sticky charms.

Certainly the modern poets I cherish most are disturbing spirits; they do not come to coo.

A poet needs to keep his wilderness alive inside him.

Live in the layers, not on the litter.

In every house of marriage there's room for an interpreter.

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.

One critic wrote . . . that my poems sounded as though they had been translated from the Hungarian. I don't know why, but somehow that made me feel quite lighthearted.

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.

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.

Darling, do you remember the man you married? Touch me, remind me who I am.

Not that you need to be a saint to have visions worth talking about. The most effective prescription, I suspect, is to be a disciplined sinner. Perfection, as Valery noted, is work.

What makes the engine go? Desire, desire, desire.

Forward my mail to Mars.

Rhythm to me is essentially what Hopkins called the taste of self. I taste myself as rhythm.

To conquer a piece of earth and make it as beautiful as one can dream of it being: That is art, too. A man cannot be separated from the earth. I come out of the garden every day feeling, oh, inspired in a way that one needs in order to convert the daily-ness of the life into something greater than that little life itself.

A poet needs to keep his wilderness alive inside him. To remain a poet after forty requires an awareness of your darkest Africa, that part of yourself that will never be tamed.

A longing for the dance stirs in the buried life.

An old poet ought never to be caught with his technique showing.

It is my heart that's late, it is my song that's flown.