Stanley Kunitz quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Stanley Kunitz

Stanley Kunitz Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Stanley Kunitz on Wise Famous Quotes.

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

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.

Live in the layers,
not on the litter.

In every house of marriage there's room for an interpreter.

Whatever you choose to claim
of me is always yours;
nothing is truly mine
except my name. I only
borrowed this dust.

The ear writes my poems, not the mind.

What makes the engine go?
Desire, desire, desire.

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

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

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

Poetry is the enemy of the poem.

End with an image and don't explain.

It is my heart that's late,
it is my song that's flown.

Rhythm to me is essentially what Hopkins called the taste of self. I taste myself as rhythm.

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

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

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

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

The supreme morality of art is to endure.

The thing that eats the heart is mostly the heart.

The unconscious creates, the ego edits.

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

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 to lose.

There's grammar in my bones!

The heart breaks and breaks and lives by breaking it is necessary to go through dark and deeper dark and not to turn

When, on your dangerous mission gone,
You underrate our foes as dunces,
Be wary, not of sudden gun,
But of your partner at the dances.

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

An old poet ought never to be caught with his technique showing.

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.

I dance/for the joy of surviving, at the edge of the road.

A longing for the dance stirs in the buried life.

The sand whispered, Be separate, the stones taught me, Be hard.

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

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

Darling,
do you remember
the man you married?
Touch me,
remind me who I am.

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

Certainly the modern poets I cherish most are disturbing spirits; they do not come to coo.

Poetry today is easier to write but harder to remember.

My mother never forgave my father

Forward my mail to Mars.

A poem has secrets that the poet knows nothing of.

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

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.