Stanley Kunitz > Quotes

“The universe is a continuous web. Touch it at any point and the whole web quivers.”
― Stanley Kunitz

“The Layers

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.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
Yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
“Live in the layers,
not on the litter.”
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.”
― Stanley Kunitz, The Collected Poems

“I can hardly wait for tomorrow, it means a new life for me each and every day.”
― Stanley Kunitz

“the heart breaks and breaks
and lives by breaking.
It is necessary to go
through dark and deeper dark
and not to turn.

from “The Testing Tree”
― Stanley Kunitz, The Testing Tree: Poems

“End with an image and don't explain.”
― Stanley Kunitz, The Collected Poems

“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.”
― Stanley Kunitz, The Collected Poems

“In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
“Live in the layers,
not on the litter.”
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.”
― Stanley Kunitz, The Collected Poems

“Be what you are. Give What is yours to give. Have Style. Dare.”
― Stanley Kunitz

“Darling,
do you remember
the man you married?
Touch me,
remind me who I am.”
― Stanley Kunitz

“When you look back on a lifetime and think of what has been given to the world by your presence, your fugitive presence, inevitably you think of your art, whatever it may be, as the gift you have made to the world in acknowledgment of the gift you have been given, which is the life itself... That work is not an expression of the desire for praise or recognition, or prizes, but the deepest manifestation of your gratitiude for the gift of life.”
― Stanley Kunitz

“What makes the engine go?
Desire, desire, desire.”
― Stanley Kunitz

“You must be careful not to deprive the poem of its wild origin.”
― Stanley Kunitz

“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.”
― Stanley Kunitz

“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.”
― Stanley Kunitz, The Collected Poems

“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.”
― Stanley Kunitz, The Collected Poems

“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.”
― Stanley Kunitz

“...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.”
― Stanley Kunitz

“Miss Murphy in first grade

wrote its name in chalk

across the board and told us

it was roaring down the storm tracks

of the milky way at frightful speed

and if it wandered off its course

and smashed into the earth

there'd be no school tomorrow.”
― Stanley Kunitz

“Forward my mail to Mars.”
― Stanley Kunitz, The Testing Tree: Poems

“I refuse to turn to theology to justify the life or redeem it. There is a question always of the connection to the eternal. I say to myself above all, keep alive your conviction that there are sacred elements in the life in the practice of the life that must be respected. But the conviction in the existence of the sacred does not necessarily imply that you need to believe in a creator, because we are the ones that made the sacred.”
― Stanley Kunitz

“Old myths, old gods, old heroes have never died.
They are only sleeping at the bottom of your mind,
waiting for our call. We have need for them.
They represent the wisdom of our race.”
― Stanley Kunitz

“I dropped my hoe and ran into the house and started to write this poem, 'End of Summer.’ It began as a celebration of wild geese. Eventually the geese flew out of the poem, but I like to think they left behind the sound of their beating wings.”
― Stanley Kunitz

“Toward dawn we shared with you
your hour of desolation,
the huge lingering passion
of your unearthly out cry,
as you swung your blind head
towards us and laboriously opened
a bloodshot, glistening eye,
in which we swam with terror and recognition.”
― Stanley Kunitz

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

“There's grammar in my bones!”
― Stanley Kunitz, The Collected Poems

“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.”
― Stanley Kunitz

“Some poems present themselves as cliffs that need to be climbed. Others are so defensive that when you approach their enclosure you half expect to be met by a snarling dog at the gate. Still others want to smother you with their sticky charms.”
― Stanley Kunitz

“The poem in the head is always perfect. Resistance starts when you try to convert it into language. Language itself is a kind of resistance to the pure flow of self.”
― Stanley Kunitz

“Transformations

All night he ran, his body air,
But that was in another year.

Lately the answered shape of his laughter,
The shape of his smallest word, is fire.

He who is a fierce young crier
Of poems will be as tranquil as water,

Keeping, in sunset glow, the pure
Image of limitless desire;

Then enter earth and come to be,
Inch by inch, geography.”
― Stanley Kunitz, The Collected Poems

“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.”
― Stanley Kunitz, The Collected Poems