Stanley Kunitz Quotes

Quotes about:

• The universe is a continuous web. Touch it at any point and the whole web quivers.

  Stanley Kunitz

  Quiver, Whole, Universe

  54 Copy quote

• 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 think of your art, whatever it may be, as the gift you have made to the world in acknowledgment of the gift you have been given, which is the life itself... That work is not an expression of the desire for praise or recognition, or prizes, but the deepest manifestation of your gratitiude for the gift of life.

  Stanley Kunitz

  Art, Thinking, Expression

  31 Copy quote

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

  Stanley Kunitz

  Giving, Style, Dare

  Stanley Kunitz (1974). “The terrible threshold: selected poems, 1940-1970”, Harvill Secker

  28 Copy quote

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

  Stanley Kunitz

  Mean, Waiting, New Life

  36 Copy quote

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

  Stanley Kunitz

  People, Frailty, Knows

  23 Copy quote

• Poetry is ultimately mythology, the telling of stories of the soul. The old myths, the old gods, the old heroes have never died. They are only sleeping at the bottom of our minds, waiting for our call. We have need of them, for in their sum they epitomize the wisdom and experience of the race.

  Stanley Kunitz

  Hero, Sleep, Race

  24 Copy quote

• A poem has secrets that the poet knows nothing of.

  Stanley Kunitz

  Secret, Poet, Knows

  10 Copy quote

• I want to write poems that are natural, luminous, deep, spare. I dream of an art so transparent that you can look through and see the world.

  Stanley Kunitz

  Dream, Art, Writing

  17 Copy quote

• I associate the garden with the whole experience of being alive, and so, there is nothing in the range of human experience that is separate from what the garden can signify in its eagerness and its insistence, and in its driving energy to live -- to grow, to bear fruit.

  Stanley Kunitz

  Garden, Energy, Alive

  7 Copy quote

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

  Stanley Kunitz

  Poetry, Language, Poetry Is

  Stanley Kunitz, Kent P. Ljungquist (2013). “Conversations with Stanley Kunitz”, p.69, Univ. Press of Mississippi

  10 Copy quote

• In a murderous time/the heart breaks and breaks/and lives by breaking.

  Stanley Kunitz

  Heart, Heart Break, Break

  Stanley Kunitz, Kent P. Ljungquist (2013). “Conversations with Stanley Kunitz”, p.119, Univ. Press of Mississippi

  13 Copy quote

• The first task of the poet is to create the person who will write the poems.

  Stanley Kunitz

  Writing, Tasks, Firsts

  5 Copy quote

• End with an image and don't explain.

  Stanley Kunitz

  Writing, Ends

  15 Copy quote

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

  Stanley Kunitz

  Doors, Window

  6 Copy quote

• The poem comes in the form of a blessing, like rapture breaking on the mind.

  Stanley Kunitz

  Blessing, Mind, Form

  24 Copy quote

• Memory is each man's poet-in-residence.

  Stanley Kunitz

  Memories, Men, Poet

  Stanley Kunitz, Kent P. Ljungquist (2013). “Conversations with Stanley Kunitz”, p.10, Univ. Press of Mississippi

  7 Copy quote

• 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 perfection.

  Stanley Kunitz

  Dream, Garden, Perfection

  10 Copy quote

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

  Stanley Kunitz

  Be Careful, Careful

  21 Copy quote

• 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 litter." Though I lack the art to decipher it, no doubt the next chapter in my book of transformations is already written. I am not done with my changes.

  Stanley Kunitz

  Art, Book, Moon

  "The Collected Poems of Stanley Kunitz (The Layers)". Book by Stanley Kunitz, 1978.

  4 Copy quote

• I have walked through many lives,
  some of them my own,
  and I am not who I was,
  though some principle of being
  abides, from which I struggle
  not to stray.

  Stanley Kunitz

  Struggle, Principles, My Own

  Stanley Kunitz, “The Layers”

  21 Copy quote

• ...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.

  Stanley Kunitz

  Writing, Bed, Ears

  6 Copy quote

• The poem in the head is always perfect. Resistance begins when you try to convert it into language.

  Stanley Kunitz

  Perfect, Trying, Resistance

  18 Copy quote

• How shall the heart be reconciled / To its feast of losses?

  Stanley Kunitz

  Heart, Loss

  Stanley Kunitz, “The Layers”

  9 Copy quote

• I dropped my hoe and ran into the house and started to write this poem, 'End of Summer.’ It began as a celebration of wild geese. Eventually the geese flew out of the poem, but I like to think they left behind the sound of their beating wings.

  Stanley Kunitz

  Summer, Writing, Thinking

  9 Copy quote

• Deftly they opened the brain of a child, and it was full of flying dreams.

  Stanley Kunitz

  Dream, Children, Flying

  Stanley Kunitz (1944). “Passport to the war: a selection of poems”

  17 Copy quote

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