Stephen Dunn Quotes

Quotes about:

• And the words we find are always insufficient, like love, though they are often lovely and all we have.

  Stephen Dunn

  Like Love, Lovely, Insufficient

  Stephen Dunn (1995). “New and Selected Poems 1974-1994”, p.58, W. W. Norton & Company

  47 Copy quote

• I’ve had it with all stingy-hearted sons of bitches. A heart is to be spent.

  Stephen Dunn

  Heart, Son, Hearted

  Stephen Dunn (2010). “What Goes On: Selected and New Poems 1995-2009”, p.67, W. W. Norton & Company

  17 Copy quote

• Isn't there a curious elegance in how one moment passes into another?

  Stephen Dunn

  Moments, Elegance, Curious

  Stephen Dunn (1999). “Riffs and Reciprocities: Prose Pairs”, p.44, W. W. Norton & Company

  6 Copy quote

• I will try to disappoint you better than anyone ever has.

  Stephen Dunn

  Trying, Disappoint

  Stephen Dunn (1990). “Between Angels”, p.164, W. W. Norton & Company

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• What feeling feels like over time. An attempt to screw up what feeling feels like over time. Heartbreak and a high C.... The often welcome melodic lie.... The soul's undersong. The orchestration of randomness, a flirtation with the boundaries of silence and space.... a reminder that the self wants to disappear, be taken away from itself and returned.

  Stephen Dunn

  Music, Lying, Taken

  9 Copy quote

• I wrote poetry for seven or eight years, maybe longer, before I could say I was a poet. If people asked, I'd say I wrote poetry; I wouldn't go further. I was in my mid- to late-thirties before I felt that I was a poet, which I think meant that I had begun to embody my poems in some way. I wasn't just a writer of them. Hard to say what, as a poet, my place in the world is. Some place probably between recognition and neglect.

  Stephen Dunn

  Thinking, People, World

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  7 Copy quote

• I’ll always deny that I kissed her. I was just whispering into her mouth.

  Stephen Dunn

  Whispering, Mouths, Deny

  Stephen Dunn (1998). “Loosestrife: Poems”, p.31, W. W. Norton & Company

  7 Copy quote

• There are always the simple events of your life that you might try to convert into legend.

  Stephen Dunn

  Simple, Trying, Events

  Stephen Dunn (1995). “New and Selected Poems 1974-1994”, p.21, W. W. Norton & Company

  9 Copy quote

• Everything I can't see / is at least as real as what I can.

  Stephen Dunn

  Real, I Can

  Stephen Dunn (2010). “Different Hours: Poems”, p.87, W. W. Norton & Company

  4 Copy quote

• Altruism is for those who can't endure their desires. There's a world as ambiguous as a moan, a pleasure moan our earnest neighbors might think a crime. It's where we could live. I'll say I love you, Which will lead, of course, to disappointment, but those words unsaid poison every next moment. I will try to disappoint you better than anyone else has. --Mon Semblable

  Stephen Dunn

  Disappointment, Love You, Thinking

  Stephen Dunn (1995). “New and Selected Poems 1974-1994”, p.230, W. W. Norton & Company

  7 Copy quote

• All good poems are victories over something.

  Stephen Dunn

  Victory

  Stephen Dunn (2001). “Walking Light: Memoirs and Essays on Poetry”, p.86, BOA Editions, Ltd.

  4 Copy quote

• Oh abstractions are just abstract
  until they have an ache in them.

  Stephen Dunn

  Abstract, Ache, Abstraction

  Stephen Dunn (1990). “Between Angels”, p.142, W. W. Norton & Company

  7 Copy quote

• If the motive of writing is for some people a kind of exercise in dirty laundry, that's one thing. I've always thought of my poems as meant to be overheard, as I think all of these poems are. It seems to me if you get experience right, even your most painful or humiliating experiences - if you get those experiences right for yourself and make discoveries as you go along and find for them some formal glue - they will be poems for others.

  Stephen Dunn

  Dirty, Writing, Exercise

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  6 Copy quote

• I love what's left after love has been tested.

  Stephen Dunn

  Has Beens, Left, Tested

  Stephen Dunn (1999). “Riffs and Reciprocities: Prose Pairs”, p.100, W. W. Norton & Company

  4 Copy quote

• Better to be furious at one thing, become radiant with purpose. Better to love links and rhythms than all-embracing answers.

  Stephen Dunn

  Purpose, Answers, Links

  Stephen Dunn (1999). “Riffs and Reciprocities: Prose Pairs”, p.111, W. W. Norton & Company

  8 Copy quote

• Poetry does so many different things, it's difficult to say anything definitive about its role, which of course varies from culture to culture. It can range from being stories of the tribe to the private lyric, to being as W.H. Auden said "the clear expression of mixed feelings" to nonsense verse.

  Stephen Dunn

  Feelings, Say Anything, Culture

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  5 Copy quote

• A good many of my poems over the years have alluded to or taken on the political. Stevens has a line in one of his essays: "Reality exerts pressure on the imagination." Inevitably what is omnipresent in the culture exerts its pressure on our imaginations to respond to it, even if indirectly. But in this case the backdrop of 9/11, coincident with the breakup of a marriage, the finding of new love, some kind of personal cataclysm... all of those were forces informing the poems in some way.

  Stephen Dunn

  Breakup, Taken, Reality

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• Now and again I feel the astonishment of being alive like this, in this body.

  Stephen Dunn

  Alive, Body, Astonishment

  Stephen Dunn (1995). “New and Selected Poems 1974-1994”, p.7, W. W. Norton & Company

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• When I stop becoming, that's when I worry.

  Stephen Dunn

  Worry, Becoming

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• I've tried to become someone else for a while, only to discover that he, too, was me.

  Stephen Dunn

  Identity, Juicy

  Stephen Dunn (2013). “Here and Now: Poems”, p.86, W. W. Norton & Company

  6 Copy quote

• Originality, of course, is what occurs when something new arises out of what's already been done.

  Stephen Dunn

  Done, Originality, Something New

  Stephen Dunn (2001). “Walking Light: Memoirs and Essays on Poetry”, p.2, BOA Editions, Ltd.

  4 Copy quote

• Perhaps basketball and poetry have just a few things in common, but the most important is the possibility of transcendence. The opposite is labor. In writing, every writer knows when he or she is laboring to achieve an effect. You want to get from here to there, but find yourself willing it, forcing it. The equivalent in basketball is aiming your shot, a kind of strained and usually ineffective purposefulness. What you want is to be in some kind of flow, each next moment a discovery.

  Stephen Dunn

  Basketball, Writing, Discovery

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

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

  Stephen Dunn

  Acceptance, World, Moments

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

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