Stanley Kunitz Quotes

39 quotes in 525 categories

• Poetry today is easier to write but harder to remember. Easier
• The heart breaks and breaks and lives by breaking it is necessary to go through dark and deeper dark and not to turn Break
• 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… Acknowledgment
• What makes the engine go? Desire, desire, desire. Desire
• 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… Already Written
• End with an image and don't explain. End
• 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… Alive
• I can hardly wait for tomorrow, it means a new life for me each and every day. Day
• Be what you are. Give What is yours to give. Have Style. Dare. Dare
• ...few young poets [are] testing their poems against the ear. They're writing for the page, and the page, let me tell you, is a cold… Bed
• In a murderous time/the heart breaks and breaks/and lives by breaking. Break
• Darling, do you remember the man you married? Touch me, remind me who I am. Darling
• We have all been expelled from the Garden, but the ones who suffer most in exile are those who are still permitted to dream of… All
• You must be careful not to deprive the poem of its wild origin. Careful
• 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… Fuse
• Forward my mail to Mars. Forward
• The universe is a continuous web. Touch it at any point and the whole web quivers. Any
• 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… Africa
• Old myths, old gods, old heroes have never died. They are only sleeping at the bottom of our mind, waiting for our call. We have… Bottom

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