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Stephen Dunn Quotes - Page 2

All Quotes Feelings Writing
A true inner world is often revealed by style and sensibility as much as by what appears to be confession.

A true inner world is often revealed by style and sensibility as much as by what appears to be confession.

Stephen Dunn
Style, World, Confession
Source: www.guernicamag.com

A moment of something between acceptance and resignation of one's smallness in the world.

Stephen Dunn
Acceptance, World, Moments
Source: www.guernicamag.com

The world is always somewhat vicious. I take that as a given, but at various times in various circumstances that fact will be no more than a shadow or an echo behind some poem. Other times it will be more manifest. I try to write myself into articulations of half-felt, half-known feelings, without program. I'm always working toward getting my world and, hopefully, the world outside of me into a version that makes sense of it. Viciousness requires the same precision as love does.

Stephen Dunn
Writing, Feelings, Shadow
Source: www.guernicamag.com

exaggerated sunsets / splashed with rain, odd collisions / of roots, animals, seeds. / I didn't like a thing I saw, / so much effort to be strange.

Stephen Dunn
Rain, Sunset, Animal
Stephen Dunn (2010). “Different Hours: Poems”, p.88, W. W. Norton & Company

Bring to me, it said, continual proof / you've been alive.

Stephen Dunn
Alive, Proof, Said
Stephen Dunn (2006). “The Insistence of Beauty: Poems”, p.18, W. W. Norton & Company

I think because my parents died in their early 50s, mid 50s, I always thought I would die young. And that's been both a useful thing and I suspect something that's haunted me a little bit.

Stephen Dunn
Thinking, Parent, Littles
"Pulitzer Prize for Poetry: Stephen Dunn". "PBS NewsHour" with Elizabeth Farnsworth, www.pbs.org. April 26, 2001.

I make myself up from everything I am, or could be. For many years I was more desire than fact. When I stop becoming, that’s when I worry.

Stephen Dunn
Years, Worry, Desire

Connubial Because with alarming accuracy she’d been identifying patterns I was unaware of—this tic, that tendency, like the way I've mastered the language of intimacy in order to conceal how I felt— I knew I was in danger of being terribly understood.

Stephen Dunn
Order, Way, Patterns
Stephen Dunn (2013). “Here and Now: Poems”, p.89, W. W. Norton & Company

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