Stanley Kunitz Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

End with an image and don't explain.

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

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

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

The unconscious creates, the ego edits.

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.

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.

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

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

Poetry is the enemy of the poem.

The supreme morality of art is to endure.

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

One critic wrote . . . that my poems sounded as though they had been translated from the Hungarian. I don't know why, but somehow that made me feel quite lighthearted.

A poem has secrets that the poet knows nothing of.

Poetry today is easier to write but harder to remember.

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

Not that you need to be a saint to have visions worth talking about. The most effective prescription, I suspect, is to be a disciplined sinner. Perfection, as Valery noted, is work.

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

Forward my mail to Mars.

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

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

A longing for the dance stirs in the buried life.

Live in the layers, not on the litter.

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

The ear writes my poems, not the mind.

...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.

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

My mother never forgave my father

A poet needs to keep his wilderness alive inside him. To remain a poet after forty requires an awareness of your darkest Africa, that part of yourself that will never be tamed.

A poet needs to keep his wilderness alive inside him.

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

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

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