Home > Author > Gregory Orr
1 " Maybe she loved me,maybe not –who knows?Not even the godscan see intoa human heart –it’s that dark. "
― Gregory Orr
2 " Each night, I knelt on a marble slaband scrubbed at the blood.I scrubbed for years and still it was there.But tonight the bones in my feetbegin to burn. I stand upand start walking, and the slabappears under my feet with each step,a white road only as long as your body. "
3 " Love is what I sought."Hunger," they called it. "
― Gregory Orr , The Caged Owl: New & Selected Poems
4 " If we’re not supposed to dance, Why all this music? "
5 " And yet I swearI love this earththat scars and scalds,that burns my feet. And even hell is holy. "
6 " To me, poetry is about survival first of all. Survival of the individual self, survival of the emotional life. "
7 " I was born with a knife in one hand and a wound in the other. "
8 " Where would I be if not for your wild heart?I ask this not from love, but selfishly—how could I live? How could I make my art? "
9 " Somehow something has gone wrong with poetry in our culture. We have lost touch with its purpose and value, and in doing so, we have lost contact with essential aspects of our own emotional and spiritual lives. "
― Gregory Orr , Poetry as Survival
10 " To learn by heart is to learnBy hurt—grief inscribingIts wisdom in the soft tissue.Song you sing, poem you are—Finger moving, preciseAs a phonograph needle,Along the groove of scar. "
― Gregory Orr , How Beautiful the Beloved
11 " Writing often reveals us to ourselves, lets us name what’s important to us and what has been silent or silenced inside us. "
― Gregory Orr , A Primer for Poets and Readers of Poetry
12 " And to live only once–What if that’s not enough? "
― Gregory Orr , Concerning the Book that is the Body of the Beloved
13 " Maybe it was always simple:Loss surrounds us.Who would deny it?We ourselves are loss, are lost. "
14 " when poets go back by way of memory and imagination to past traumas to engage or re-engage them, then those poets are taking control—are shaping and ordering and asserting power over the hurtful events. In lyric poems, they’re both telling the story from their point of view and also shaping the experience into an order (the poem) that shows they have power over what (in the past) overpowered them. "
15 " Her eye and my ‘I’: Her gazing Creates me. "
16 " The way the word sinksinto the deep snow of the page "
― Gregory Orr , Burning the Empty Nests
17 " I want to study The book of the world: Every vanishing page. "
18 " If shadows could talkthey would tell useverything we know alreadybut in the melodiouslanguage of tearsin which every third word rhymes.from “Some Notes on Shadows "
19 " The deer carcass hangs from a rafter.Wrapped in blankets, a boy keeps watchfrom a pile of loose hay. Then he sleepsand dreams about a death that is coming:Inside him, there are small bonesscattered in a field among burdocks and dead grass.He will spend his life walking there,gathering the bones together.Pigeons rustle in the eaves.At his feet, the German shepherdsnaps its jaws in its sleep. "
20 " because you’ve chosen poetry, you’re condemned to wonder at skills and felicities of language or imagination in the poems of others that you yourself may never achieve, no matter how hard you work toward them—things that will always be beyond your reach but also will always be luring you on. "
