Stanley Kunitz Quotes

Quotes about:

• The universe is a continuous web. Touch it at any point and the whole web quivers.

  Stanley Kunitz

  Quiver, Whole, Universe

  53 Copy quote

• 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

  Art, Thinking, Expression

  30 Copy quote

• Be what you are. Give What is yours to give. Have Style. Dare.

  Stanley Kunitz

  Giving, Style, Dare

  Stanley Kunitz (1974). “The terrible threshold: selected poems, 1940-1970”, Harvill Secker

  27 Copy quote

• I can hardly wait for tomorrow, it means a new life for me each and every day.

  Stanley Kunitz

  Mean, Waiting, New Life

  35 Copy quote

• We have to learn how to live with our frailties. The best people I know are inadequate and unashamed.

  Stanley Kunitz

  People, Frailty, Knows

  22 Copy quote

• Poetry is ultimately mythology, the telling of stories of the soul. The old myths, the old gods, the old heroes have never died. They are only sleeping at the bottom of our minds, waiting for our call. We have need of them, for in their sum they epitomize the wisdom and experience of the race.

  Stanley Kunitz

  Hero, Sleep, Race

  23 Copy quote

• A poem has secrets that the poet knows nothing of.

  Stanley Kunitz

  Secret, Poet, Knows

  9 Copy quote

• I associate the garden with the whole experience of being alive, and so, there is nothing in the range of human experience that is separate from what the garden can signify in its eagerness and its insistence, and in its driving energy to live -- to grow, to bear fruit.

  Stanley Kunitz

  Garden, Energy, Alive

  6 Copy quote

• Poetry is language surprised in the act of changing into meaning.

  Stanley Kunitz

  Poetry, Language, Poetry Is

  Stanley Kunitz, Kent P. Ljungquist (2013). “Conversations with Stanley Kunitz”, p.69, Univ. Press of Mississippi

  9 Copy quote

• I like an ending that's both a door and a window.

  Stanley Kunitz

  Doors, Window

  5 Copy quote

• The first task of the poet is to create the person who will write the poems.

  Stanley Kunitz

  Writing, Tasks, Firsts

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Dream, Art, Writing

  16 Copy quote

• In a murderous time/the heart breaks and breaks/and lives by breaking.

  Stanley Kunitz

  Heart, Heart Break, Break

  Stanley Kunitz, Kent P. Ljungquist (2013). “Conversations with Stanley Kunitz”, p.119, Univ. Press of Mississippi

  12 Copy quote

• End with an image and don't explain.

  Stanley Kunitz

  Writing, Ends

  14 Copy quote

• The poem comes in the form of a blessing, like rapture breaking on the mind.

  Stanley Kunitz

  Blessing, Mind, Form

  23 Copy quote

• Memory is each man's poet-in-residence.

  Stanley Kunitz

  Memories, Men, Poet

  Stanley Kunitz, Kent P. Ljungquist (2013). “Conversations with Stanley Kunitz”, p.10, Univ. Press of Mississippi

  6 Copy quote

• You must be careful not to deprive the poem of its wild origin.

  Stanley Kunitz

  Be Careful, Careful

  20 Copy quote

• 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

  Struggle, Principles, My Own

  Stanley Kunitz, “The Layers”

  20 Copy quote

• The poem in the head is always perfect. Resistance begins when you try to convert it into language.

  Stanley Kunitz

  Perfect, Trying, Resistance

  17 Copy quote

• 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

  Summer, Writing, Thinking

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  Dream, Garden, Perfection

  9 Copy quote

• Poetry is the enemy of the poem.

  Stanley Kunitz

  Enemy, Poetry Is

  Stanley Kunitz, Kent P. Ljungquist (2013). “Conversations with Stanley Kunitz”, p.11, Univ. Press of Mississippi

  8 Copy quote

• Writer's block is a natural affliction. Writers who have never experienced it have something wrong with them. It means there isn't enough friction-that they aren't making enough of an effort to reconcile the contradictions of life. All you get is sweet monotonous flow. Writer's block is nothing to commit suicide over. It simply indicates some imbalance between your experience and your art, and I think that's constructive.

  Stanley Kunitz

  Suicide, Sweet, Art

  3 Copy quote

• The heart breaks and breaks and lives by breaking it is necessary to go through dark and deeper dark and not to turn

  Stanley Kunitz

  Heart, Dark, Break

  Stanley Kunitz (1974). “The terrible threshold: selected poems, 1940-1970”, Harvill Secker

  7 Copy quote

• Deftly they opened the brain of a child, and it was full of flying dreams.

  Stanley Kunitz

  Dream, Children, Flying

  Stanley Kunitz (1944). “Passport to the war: a selection of poems”

  16 Copy quote

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