Gregory Orr Quotes

Poetry is the thread that leads us out of the labyrinth of despair and into the light.

That's crudely put, but
If we're not supposed to dance,
Why all this music?

For Trisha
The truth's in myth not fact,
a story fragment or an act
that lasts and stands for all:
how bees made honey in a skull.

Beauty is like life itself: a dawn mist the sun burns off. It gives no peace, no rest.

With "poets dead and gone" as Keats says in "Mermaid Tavern" they are alive and talking to us and us to them.

I believe in poetry as a way of surviving the emotional chaos, spiritual confusions, and traumatic events that come with being alive.

To guide someone
through the halls of hell
is not the same as love.

To me, poetry is about survival first of all. Survival of the individual self, survival of the emotional life.

Where would I be if not for your wild heart?
I ask this not from love, but selfishly -
how could I live? How could I make my art?

When you're a young poet, reading is a search for your lost family.

And yet I swear
I love this earth
that scars and scalds,
that burns my feet.

And even hell is holy.

The way the word sinks
into the deep snow of the page

Every breath is a resurrection.

When it's right you can't say Who is kissing whom.