Stanley Kunitz

The supreme morality of art is to endure.

— Stanley Kunitz

“Mind's acres are forever green: Oh, I Shall keep perpetual summer here; I shall Refuse to let one startled swallow die, Or,…

— Stanley Kunitz

Be what you are. Give What is yours to give. Have Style. Dare.

— Stanley Kunitz

Not that you need to be a saint to have visions worth talking about. The most effective prescription, I suspect, is to…

— Stanley Kunitz

I can hardly wait for tomorrow, it means a new life for me each and every day.

— Stanley Kunitz

The unconscious creates, the ego edits.

— Stanley Kunitz

I like an ending that's both a door and a window.

— Stanley Kunitz

One critic wrote . . . that my poems sounded as though they had been translated from the Hungarian. I don't know…

— Stanley Kunitz

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

— Stanley Kunitz

The heart breaks and breaks and lives by breaking it is necessary to go through dark and deeper dark and not to…

— Stanley Kunitz

A longing for the dance stirs in the buried life.

— Stanley Kunitz

Poetry is language surprised in the act of changing into meaning.

— Stanley Kunitz

Poetry is the enemy of the poem.

— Stanley Kunitz

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

— Stanley Kunitz

We have to learn how to live with our frailties. The best people I know are inadequate and unashamed.

— Stanley Kunitz

“Transformations All night he ran, his body air, But that was in another year. Lately the answered shape of his laughter, The…

— Stanley Kunitz

You must be careful not to deprive the poem of its wild origin.

— Stanley Kunitz

“Old myths, old gods, old heroes have never died. They are only sleeping at the bottom of your mind, waiting for our…

— Stanley Kunitz

...few young poets [are] testing their poems against the ear. They're writing for the page, and the page, let me tell you,…

— Stanley Kunitz

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

— Stanley Kunitz

A poet needs to keep his wilderness alive inside him. To remain a poet after forty requires an awareness of your darkest…

— Stanley Kunitz

Writer's block is a natural affliction. Writers who have never experienced it have something wrong with them. It means there isn't enough…

— Stanley Kunitz

When you look back on a lifetime and think of what has been given to the world by your presence, your fugitive…

— Stanley Kunitz

When they shall paint our sockets gray And light us like a stinking fuse, Remember that we once could say, Yesterday we…

— Stanley Kunitz

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

— Stanley Kunitz