Galway Kinnell

Turn on the dream you lived through the unwavering gaze. It is as you thought: the living burn. In the floating days…

— Galway Kinnell

“The wages of dying are love.”

— Galway Kinnell

Is there a mechanism of death, that so mutilates existence no one, gets over it not even the dead?

— Galway Kinnell

I start off but I don't know where I'm going; I try this avenue and that avenue, that turns out to be…

— Galway Kinnell

“The Correspondence-School Instructor Says Goodbye to His Poetry Students Goodbye, lady in Bangor, who sent me snapshots of yourself, after definitely hinting…

— Galway Kinnell

the rest of my days I spend wandering: wondering what, anyway, was that sticky infusion, that rank flavor of blood, that poetry,…

— Galway Kinnell

I love to go out in late September among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries to eat blackberries for breakfast, the stalks…

— Galway Kinnell

“Bending over her bed, I saw the smile I must have seen when gaping up from the crib. Knowing death will come,…

— Galway Kinnell

“When the man touches through to the exact center of the woman, he lies motionless, in equilibrium, in absolute desire, at the…

— Galway Kinnell

“This happened to your father and to you, Galway-sick to stay, longing to come up against the ends of the earth, and…

— Galway Kinnell

“Wait Wait, for now. Distrust everything, if you have to. But trust the hours. Haven't they carried you everywhere, up to now?…

— Galway Kinnell

Prose is walking; poetry is flying

— Galway Kinnell

Never mind. The self is the least of it. Let our scars fall in love.

— Galway Kinnell

That's the way it is with poetry: When it is incomprehensible it seems profound, and when you understand it, it is only…

— 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,…

— Galway Kinnell

“When a group of people get up from a table, the table doesn’t know which way any of them will go.”

— Galway Kinnell

“When the lover goes, the vow though broken remains, that trace of eternity love brings down among us stays, to give dignity…

— Galway Kinnell

“The bud stands for all things, even for those things that don’t flower, for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing; though sometimes…

— Galway Kinnell

“You live under the Sign of the Bear, who flounders through chaos in his starry blubber: poor fool, poor forked branch of…

— 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…

— Galway Kinnell

To me, poetry is somebody standing up, so to speak, and saying, with as little concealment as possible, what it is for…

— Galway Kinnell

The first step... shall be to lose the way.

— Galway Kinnell

...it is necessary to reteach a thing its loveliness, to put a hand on its brow of the flower and retell it…

— Galway Kinnell

Sometimes it is necessary To reteach a thing its loveliness

— Galway Kinnell

Let our scars fall in love.

— Galway Kinnell