Dana Gioia Quotes

Quotes about:

• The purpose of arts education is not to produce more artists, though that is a byproduct. The real purpose of arts education is to create complete human beings capable of leading successful and productive lives in a free society.

  Dana Gioia

  Art, Real, Successful

  Commencement speech, Stanford University, June 17, 2007.

  56 Copy quote

• There are some truths about life that can be expressed only as stories, or songs, or images. Art delights, instructs, consoles. It educates our emotions.

  Dana Gioia

  Song, Art, Stories

  31 Copy quote

• Art is an irreplaceable way of understanding and expressing the world.

  Dana Gioia

  Art, Understanding, World

  Dana Gioia's commencement address at Stanford University, news.stanford.edu. June 17, 2007.

  4 Copy quote

• Money. You don't know where it's been, but you put it where your mouth is. And it talks!

  Dana Gioia

  Mouths, Knows

  Dana Gioia (2016). “99 Poems: New & Selected”, p.91, Macmillan

  16 Copy quote

• It seems to me that awakening to the full potential of what your life might be - beyond the possibilities of your own family, your own class, your own race, your own neighborhood - that is one of the great gifts that art affords.

  Dana Gioia

  Art, Race, Class

  4 Copy quote

• Once an author finishes a poem, he becomes merely another reader. I may remember what I intended to put into a text, but what matters is what a reader actually finds there which is usually something both more and less than the poet planned.

  Dana Gioia

  What Matters, May, Remember

  "Paradigms Lost", interview with Gloria Brame, ELF: Eclectic Literary Forum, Spring 1995.

  9 Copy quote

• Teach us the names of what we have destroyed.

  Dana Gioia

  Names, Teach, Destroyed

  Dana Gioia (2016). “99 Poems: New & Selected”, p.50, Macmillan

  7 Copy quote

• Twisting through the thorn-thick underbrush, scratched and exhausted, one turns suddenly to find an unexpected waterfall, not half a mile from the nearest road, a spot so hard to reach that no one comes a hiding place, a shrine for dragonflies and nesting jays, a sign that there is still one piece of property that won't be owned.

  Dana Gioia

  Dragonflies, Pieces, Half

  Dana Gioia (2016). “99 Poems: New & Selected”, p.47, Macmillan

  40 Copy quote

• Everyone enjoys stories of double lives and secret identities. Children have Superman; intellectuals have Wallace Stevens.

  Dana Gioia

  Children, Secret Identity, Stories

  Dana Gioia (2002). “Can Poetry Matter?: Essays on Poetry and American Culture”, Graywolf Pr

  7 Copy quote

• Current Catholic worship often ignores the essential connection between truth and beauty, body and soul, at the center of the Catholic worldview. The Church requires that we be faithful, but must we also be deaf, dumb, and blind? I deserve to suffer for my sins, but must so much of that punishment take place in church?

  Dana Gioia

  Punishment, Catholic, Dumb

  "The Catholic Writer Today". www.firstthings.com. December 2013.

  8 Copy quote

• Poetry is not a creed or dogma. It is a special way of speaking and listening.

  Dana Gioia

  Listening, Special, Way

  "Paradigms Lost", interview with Gloria Brame, ELF: Eclectic Literary Forum, Spring 1995.

  4 Copy quote

• Poetry offers a way of understanding and expressing existence that is fundamentally different from conceptual thought.

  Dana Gioia

  Art, Poetry, Understanding

  "Poetry as Enchantment". 20th anniversary issue of The Dark Horse, www.thedarkhorsemagazine.com. Summer 2015.

  7 Copy quote

• This is a prayer, inchoate and unfinished, for you, my love, my loss, my lesion, a rosary of words to count out time's illusions, all the minutes, hours, days the calendar compounds as if the past existed somewhere like an inheritance still waiting to be claimed.

  Dana Gioia

  Prayer, Loss, Past

  Dana Gioia (2016). “99 Poems: New & Selected”, p.65, Graywolf Press

  8 Copy quote

• The new year always brings us what we want Simply by bringing us along—to see A calendar with every day uncrossed, A field of snow without a single footprint.

  Dana Gioia

  New Year, Years, Snow

  Dana Gioia (2016). “99 Poems: New & Selected”, p.25, Macmillan

  9 Copy quote

• Yet the stones remain less real to those who cannot name them, or read the mute syllables graven in silica. To see a red stone is less than seeing it as jasper metamorphic quartz, cousin to the flint the Kiowa carved as arrowheads. To name is to know and remember.

  Dana Gioia

  Cousin, Real, Names

  Dana Gioia (2016). “99 Poems: New & Selected”, p.22, Macmillan

  7 Copy quote

• We lived in places that we never knew. We could not name the birds perched on our sill, Or see the trees we cut down for our view. What we possessed we always chose to kill. "We claimed the earth but did not hear her claim, And when we died, they laid us on her breast, But she refuses us until we earn Forgiveness from the lives we dispossessed.

  Dana Gioia

  Cutting, Views, Names

  Dana Gioia (2016). “99 Poems: New & Selected”, p.49, Macmillan

  5 Copy quote

• We are not as we were. Death has been our pentecost.

  Dana Gioia

  Pentecost, Has Beens

  Dana Gioia (2016). “99 Poems: New & Selected”, p.67, Macmillan

  4 Copy quote

• We offer you the landscape of your birth --
  Exquisite and despoiled. We all share blame.
  We cannot ask forgiveness of the earth
  For killing what we cannot even name.

  Dana Gioia

  Names, Earth, Landscape

  Dana Gioia (2016). “99 Poems: New & Selected”, p.50, Macmillan

  4 Copy quote

• What we conceal Is always more than what we dare confide. Think of the letters that we write our dead.

  Dana Gioia

  Writing, Thinking, Letters

  Dana Gioia (2016). “99 Poems: New & Selected”, p.70, Macmillan

  4 Copy quote

• My blessed California, you are so wise. You render death abstract, efficient, clean. Your afterlife is only real estate, And in his kingdom Death must stay unseen.

  Dana Gioia

  Wise, Real, Blessed

  Dana Gioia (2016). “99 Poems: New & Selected”, p.49, Macmillan

  7 Copy quote

• And hate the bright stillness of the noon without wind, without motion. the only other living thing a hawk, hungry for prey, suspended in the blinding, sunlit blue. And yet how gentle it seems to someone raised in a landscape short of rain- the skyline of a hill broken by no more trees than one can count, the grass, the empty sky, the wish for water.

  Dana Gioia

  Summer, Hate, Rain

  Dana Gioia (2016). “99 Poems: New & Selected”, p.35, Macmillan

  32 Copy quote

• Paradoxically, the simpler poetry is, the more difficult it becomes for a critic to discuss intelligently. Trained to explicate, the critic often loses the ability to evaluate literature outside the critical act. A work is good only in proportion to the richness and complexity of interpretations it provokes.

  Dana Gioia

  Literature, Proportion, Interpretation

  Dana Gioia (2002). “Can Poetry Matter?: Essays on Poetry and American Culture”, Graywolf Pr

  7 Copy quote

• To speak from a particular place and time is not provincialism but part of a writer's identity.

  Dana Gioia

  Identity, Speak, Particular

  "My California: Journeys by Great Writers". Book edited by Donna Wares, 1999.

  4 Copy quote

• Old empires always appeal to modern poets more than new ones.

  Dana Gioia

  Empires, Poet, Modern

  Dana Gioia (2003). “Barrier of a common language: an American looks at contemporary British poetry”, Univ of Michigan Pr

  4 Copy quote

• Being so deeply rooted in one place and culture allows a genuine writer to experiment wildly with the material without ever losing touch with its essence.

  Dana Gioia

  Essence, Culture, Losing

  Dana Gioia (2003). “Barrier of a common language: an American looks at contemporary British poetry”, Univ of Michigan Pr

  4 Copy quote

Page 1 of 2

← Prev

1

2

Next →

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin