Jan Zwicky > Quotes

“Love, I'm pretty sure, is light.”
― Jan Zwicky, Songs for Relinquishing the Earth

“Art is not merely a decorative enhancement of our lives, but a sign of our desire to live in the world fully and honestly.”
― Jan Zwicky

“Even the rain in its night singing, / the night rain in its forgetting, / is a kind of light.”
― Jan Zwicky, Thirty-seven Small Songs & Thirteen Silences

“One of the reasons I think we are sometimes critical of support for the arts is that art — lyric art in particular — can make us uncomfortably aware that economically expedient answers may not always be true.”
― Jan Zwicky

“that's what I wanted: words made of that: language / that could bend light.”
― Jan Zwicky, Wisdom & Metaphor

“Language, too, is a natural phenomenon.”
― Jan Zwicky, Wisdom & Metaphor

“But critique, too, is empty unless the space it clears becomes home to insight.”
― Jan Zwicky, Wisdom & Metaphor

“To understand a metaphor is to recognize that if one context or conceptual constellation is laid over another, just so, aspects or outlines will spring into focus, a common pattern will be discernible — one that makes a difference to our grasp of the individual constellations or contexts separately.”
― Jan Zwicky, Wisdom & Metaphor

“Where will my soul go
when it can't walk among them?
When the earth I have loved turns its back
and closes its eyes.

I will lie down, then, in the wreckage of meaning.
In the rot of the forest, the rot of the wind.
I will lie down in the shouting and silence,
the dust of you filling my mouth.”
― Jan Zwicky, The Long Walk

“Because she was a woman
she'd been raped.
Because she was a woman
there was no excuse.
Because she was a woman
they dragged her to the pit.
You can hear the dull snap
as the bone breaks under flesh.”
― Jan Zwicky, The Long Walk

“In illness, we grasp how the self approaches the condition of language.”
― Jan Zwicky, Wisdom & Metaphor