Stanley Kunitz QUOTES

21 " 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

22 " Forward my mail to Mars. "

― Stanley Kunitz , The Testing Tree: Poems

23 " 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

24 " 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

25 " There's grammar in my bones! "

― Stanley Kunitz , The Collected Poems

26 " 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

27 " 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

28 " Whatever you choose to claim
of me is always yours;
nothing is truly mine
except my name. I only
borrowed this dust. "

― Stanley Kunitz

29 " 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

30 " 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

31 " 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

32 " The thing that eats the heart is mostly the heart. "

― Stanley Kunitz

33 " Some must break
Upon the wheel of love, but not the strange,
The secret lords, whom only death can change. "

― Stanley Kunitz , The Collected Poems

34 " The sand whispered, Be separate, the stones taught me, Be hard. "

― Stanley Kunitz

35 " The poet doesn’t so much disappear into the poem as become the poem. It is a concentration of faculties, of everything you are or hope to be, and at that moment you have a focus not only on your conscious life, but your unconscious world, and it is as much an expression of your whole being as is conceivable. "

― Stanley Kunitz , The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden

36 " And because I was so mute
and loved the names of all the words
and suddenly am tired unto death
please help me, everyone, sing me alive. "

― Stanley Kunitz

37 " In murderous times / the heart breaks and breaks / and lives by breaking. "

― Stanley Kunitz

38 " Meanwhile. thinking of love, I have been dressed
For such destruction. Though it surely break,
Come pluck the deep wild kernel of my breast,
That wafer of devotion, and partake
Of its compacted sweetness, till it bring
The soul to rise upon the fleshly wing.

— Stanley Kunitz, last strophe to “Ambergris,” The Collected Poems (W. W. Norton & Co., 2000) "

― Stanley Kunitz , The Collected Poems

39 " Ambergris"

This body, tapped of every drop of breath,
In vast corruption of its swollen pride,
Proclaims itself the very whale of death;
Yet, I believe, the hand that plumbs its side
Will gather dissolution's sweet increase.
Exquisite fern of death--in nature, ambergris.

Meanwhile, thinking of love, I have been dressed
For such destruction. Though it surely break,
Come pluck the deep wild kernel of my breast,
That wafer of devotion, and partake
Of its compacted sweetness, till it bring
The sould to rise upon its fleshly wing.

If gentle heart be scorned, in scorn of it
I shall immerse it in such bitterness,
Bather every pulse in such an acid wit,
That from my mammoth, cold, and featureless
Event of age, my enemied will flee,
Whereas my friends will stay and pillage me.
Stanley Kunitz, The Collected Poems (W. W. Norton & Co., 2000) "

― Stanley Kunitz , The Collected Poems

40 " Womanly, a shadow combed

Her dark tremendous hair beyond the violet border
Of my sleep. Strong passionate hands I had, but could not find

The red position of her heart, not the subtle order
Of her lips and breasts, nor the breathing cities of her mind.

—Stanley Kunitz, from “Poem,” The Collected Poems (W. W. Norton & Company; Reprint edition April 17, 2002) Originally published 2000. "

― Stanley Kunitz , The Collected Poems

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