Jen > Jen's Quotes

“...in the face of all dangers, in what may seem a godless region, we move forward through the agencies of love and art.”
― Mark Doty, Dog Years

“There are those fortunate hours when the world consents to be made into a poem.”
― Mark Doty

“War is what happens when language fails.”
― Margaret Atwood

“Another belief of mine: that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

“If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next—if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions—you'd be doomed. You'd be ruined as God. You'd be a stone. You'd never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You'd never love anyone, ever again. You'd never dare to.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

“Perhaps I write for no one. Perhaps for the same person children are writing for when they scrawl their names in the snow.”
― Margaret Atwood

“I read for pleasure and that is the moment I learn the most.”
― Margaret Atwood

“In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.”
― Margaret Atwood, Bluebeard's Egg

“In one day I had altered my life; my life, therefore, was alterable. This simple axiom did not call out for exegesis; no, it entered my bloodstream directly, as powerful as heroin. I could feel it pump and surge, the way it brightened my veins to a kind of glass. I had wakened that morning to narrowness and predestination and now I was falling asleep in the storm of my own free will.”
― Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries

“It's the arrangement of events which makes the stories. It's throwing away, compressing, underlining. Hindsight can give structure to anything, but you have to be able to see it. Breathing, waking and sleeping: our lives are steamed and shaped into stories. Knowing that is what keeps me from going insane, and though I don't like to admit it, sometimes it's the only thing.”
― Carol Shields, Small Ceremonies

“If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?”
― Emily Dickinson, Selected Letters

“To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.”
― Emily Dickinson

“Nature is a haunted house--but Art--is a house that tries to be haunted.”
― Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

“Because I could not stop for Death –
He kindly stopped for me –
The Carriage held but just Ourselves –
And Immortality.”
― Emily Dickinson

“If after I read a poem the world looks like that poem for 24 hours or so I'm sure it's a good one—and the same goes for paintings. ”
― Elizabeth Bishop

“All the untidy activity continues,
awful but cheerful.”
― Elizabeth Bishop

“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

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

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

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

“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

“...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

“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

“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”
― T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets

“Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.”
― T.S. Eliot

“It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.”
― William Carlos Williams, Asphodel, That Greeny Flower & Other Love Poems

“If it ain't a pleasure, it ain't a poem.”
― William Carlos Williams