James Dickey > Quotes

“A poet is someone who stands outside in the rain hoping to be struck by lightning.”
― James Dickey

“What you have to realize when you write poetry, or if you love poetry, is that poetry is just naturally the greatest god damn thing that ever was in the whole universe”
― James Dickey

“I go out on the side of a hill, maybe hunting deer, and sit there and see the shadow of night coming over the hill, and I can swear to you there is a part of me that is absolutely untouched by anything civilized. There's a part of me that has never heard of a telephone.”
― James Dickey

“I need about one hundred fifty drafts of a poem to get it right, and fifty more to make it sound spontaneous.”
― James Dickey

“I was standing in the most absolute aloneness that I had ever been given.”
― James Dickey, Deliverance

“What a view, i said again. The river was blank and mindless with beauty. It was the most glorious thing I have ever seen. But it was not seeing, really. For once it was not just seeing. It was beholding. I beheld the river in its icy pit of brightness, in its far-below sound and indifference, in its large coil and tiny points and flashes of the moon, in its long sinuous form, in its uncomprehending consequence.”
― James Dickey, Deliverance

“With my foot on the water, I feel
The moon outside,
Take on the utmost of its power.
I rise and go out through the boats.
I set my broad soul upon silver,
On the skin of the sky, on the moonlight,
Stepping outward from the earth onto water
In quest of the miracle.”
― James Dickey

“A poet is someone who stands outside in the rain hoping to be struck by lightening.”
― James Dickey, Drowning with Others

“The women of the South have brought into American literature a unique mixture of domesticity and grotesquerie.”
― James Dickey

“In his mind he was always leaving, always going somewhere, always doing something else.”
― James Dickey

“I just believe,' he said, 'that the whole thing is going to be reduced to the human body, once and for all. I want to be ready.... I think the machines are going to fail, the political systems are going to fail, and a few men are going to take to the hills and start over.... I had an air-raid shelter built,' he said. 'I'll take you down there sometime. We've got double doors and stocks of bouillon and bully beef for a couple of years at least. We've got games for the kids, and a record player and a whole set of records on how to play the recorder and get up a family recorder group. But I went down there one day and sat for a while. I decided that survival was not in the rivets and the metal, and not in the double-sealed doors and not in the marbles of Chinese checkers. It was in me. It came down to the man, and what he could do. The body is the one thing you can't fake; it's just got to be there.... At times I get the feeling I can't wait. Life is so fucked-up now, and so complicated, that I wouldn't mind if it came down, right quick, to the bare survival of who was ready to survive. You might say I've got the survival craze, the real bug. And to tell you the truth I don't think most other people have. They might cry and tear their hair and be ready for some short hysterical violence or other, but I think most of them wouldn't be too happy to give down and get it over with.... If everything wasn't dead, you could make a kind of life that wasn't out of touch with everything, with other forms of life. Where the seasons would mean something, would mean everything. Where you could hunt as you needed to, and maybe do a little light farming, and get along. You'd die early, and you'd suffer, and your children would suffer, but you'd be in touch.”
― James Dickey, Deliverance

“The body is the one thing you can't fake; it's just got to be there.”
― James Dickey, Deliverance

“... Up telephone poles,

Which rear, half out of leavage
As though they would shriek
Like things smothered by their own
Green, mindless, unkillable ghosts.
In Georgia, the legend says
That you must close your windows

At night to keep it out of the house
The glass is tinged with green, even so,

As the tendrils crawl over the fields.
The night the Kudzu has
Your pasture, you sleep like the dead.
Silence has grown oriental
And you cannot step upon the ground...

ALL: Kudzu by James Dickey”
― James Dickey

“I believe that the American poet ought to be a tough son of a bitch. He sought to hold his own in this culture on his own terms and not compromise under any circumstances.”
― James Dickey

“I had begun to suspect, however, that there is a poet—or a kind of poet—buried in every human being like Ariel in his tree, and that the people whom we are pleased to call poets are only those who have felt the need and contrived the means to release this spirit from its prison”
― James Dickey

“You never know that. I don't know it; Robert Lowell doesn't know it; John Berryman didn't know it; and Shakespeare probably didn't know it. There's never any final certainty about what you do. Your opinion of your own work fluctuates wildly. Under the right circumstances you can pick up something that you've written and approve of it; you'll think it's good and that nobody could have done exactly the same thing. Under different circumstances, you'll look at exactly the same poem and say, “My Lord, isn't that boring.” The most important thing is to be excited about what you are doing and to be working on something that you think will be the greatest thing that ever was. One of the difficulties in writing poetry is to maintain your sense of excitement and discovery about what you write.”
― James Dickey

“Detachment produces a peculiar state of mind. Maybe that's the worst sentence of all, to be deprived of feeling what a human being ought to be entitled to feel.”
― James Dickey, Self-Interviews

“After four hours I passed slowly from the country of 'nine-fingered people and prepare to meet thy God' into the drive-ins and motels and Homes of the Whopper but all I could see was the river.”
― James Dickey, Deliverance

“I had the feeling that if it were perfectly quiet, if I could hear nothing, I would never wake up. Something in the world had to pull me back, for every night I went down deep, and if I had any sensation during sleep, it was of going deeper and deeper, trying to reach a point, a line or border.”
― James Dickey, Deliverance

“Not a good man. Drinks too much in an uncreative way.”
― James Dickey, Deliverance

“Something or other was being made good. I touched the knife hilt at my side, and remembered that all men were once boys, and that boys are always looking for ways to become men. Some of the ways are easy, too; all you have to do is be satisfied that it has happened.”
― James Dickey, Deliverance

“Sliding is living antifriction. Or, no, sliding is living by antifriction. It is finding a modest thing you can do, and then greasing that thing. On both sides. It is grooving with comfort.”
― James Dickey, Deliverance

“I was inside out of myself and something was given a life-mission to say to me hungrily over and over and over your moves are exactly right for a few things in this world: we know you when you come Green Eyes, Green Eyes.”
― James Dickey

“The river and everything I remembered about it became a possession to me, a personal, private possession, as nothing else in my life ever had. Now it ran nowhere but in my head, but there it ran as though immortally. I could feel it -- I can feel it -- on different places on my body.... In me it still is, and will be until I die, green, rocky, deep, fast, slow, and beautiful beyond reality.”
― James Dickey, Deliverance

“My move my throat my wildest loves, the eyes behind my eyes. Instead I left Him, though he followed me right to the end.”
― James Dickey

“I opened my eyes and saw the dark in all its original color.”
― James Dickey, Deliverance

“Nobody worth a damn could ever come from such a place. It was nothing, like most places and people are nothing.”
― James Dickey, Deliverance

“With the stone question In the heads of Greek statues Who ask where their arms And legs and the tips of their noses Have gone.”
― James Dickey, The Whole Motion: Collected Poems, 1945–1992

“That’s all anybody has got. It depends on how strong your fantasy is, and whether you really — really — in your own mind, fit into your own fantasy, whether you measure up to what you’ve fantasized. I don’t know what yours is, but I’ll bet you don’t come up to it.”
― James Dickey, Deliverance

“If I were going to tell one of my sons how to possess the world, I would simply bring him into my house, show him that solid wall of books, and say to him: ‘the secret is in there somewhere, and even if you never find out what it is, you will still have come closer.”
― James Dickey