William Bronk > Quotes

“I want to tell my friends how beautiful / the world is. Not but what they know / it is terrible too--they know as well as I; / but nevertheless, I want to tell my friends. / Because they are. And this is what they are; / and because it is and this is what it is. / You are my friend. The world is beautiful. / Dear friend, you are. I want to tell you so.”
― William Bronk, Selected Poems

“A light, this side of the hills toward Argyle, / flowed like fog through the hollows, rose to the depth / of the hills, illumined me. I faded in it / as the world faded in me, dissolved in the light. / No one to know and nothing knowable. / Oh, we know that knowing is not our way; / but, the choice is ours, would make it our way, would leave / the world for the same world made knowable.”
― William Bronk, Selected Poems

“For loss is what we live with all the time. / None knows this better than the mind should know, the mind / that wanders, and cannot tell our name, itself / all seeds and survivals, little else, poor blind.”
― William Bronk, Selected Poems

“I want to be that Tantalus, unfed / forever, that my want's agony declare / that such as we want has nothing to say to the world; / if the world wants, it nothing wants for us. / Let me be unsatisfied.”
― William Bronk, Selected Poems

“Reality is what we are ignorant of. ”
― William Bronk, Selected Poems

“Landscape is metaphor / and only metaphor. But, oh, I have loved it so.”
― William Bronk, Selected Poems

“A green world, a scene of green, deep / with light blues, the greens made deep / by those blues. One thinks how / in certain pictures, envied landscapes are seen /
(through a window, maybe) far behind the serene /
sitter’s face, the serene pose, as though/in some impossible mirror, face to back, / human serenity gazed at a green world / which gazed at this face.”
― William Bronk, Selected Poems

“Caress me, be kind. We have no history.”
― William Bronk, Selected Poems

“We live in reality without possession or occupation and the love of reality unpossessed transfigures us.”
― William Bronk, [(Selected Poems)] [Author: William Bronk] published on

“What we are watching now as though it were real
is shadows thrown on the back of the screen by lights
and puppeteers behind it whose they are we."

- Whose They Are We”
― William Bronk

“In cosmos and microcosmos scale can be/so great and be so small/neither can stay believable, each/cancels the other out and we, too big/for one an unapparent otherwise/live self-scaled lives where we are as if we were./Bring some words together toward a real.”
― William Bronk, Bursts of Light: The Collected Later Poems