Al Purdy Quotes

#1. At a certain age you're always uncertain how other people will take you.

Al Purdy

#2. And you you
bitch no irritating
questions re love and permanence only
an unrolling lifetime here
between your rocking thighs
and the semblance of motion

Al Purdy

#3. In my own mind, I was sort of a desperate kid.

Al Purdy

#4. And it occurs to me that if I were aboard a rowboat floating in the middle of all the beer I've drunk in a lifetime, I'd never be able to see the shore.

Al Purdy

#5. I'm not religious in any formal sense, not in any God sense.

Al Purdy

#6. 'A collected poems' is either a gravestone or a testimonial to survival.

Al Purdy

#7. For me, the vast marvel is to be alive. For man, or for flowers or beast or bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly and perfectly alive.

Al Purdy

#8. I was desperately unhappy trying to adjust to the world.

Al Purdy

#9. - so much like riding dangerous women
with whiskey coloured eyes -
such women as once fell dead with their lovers
with fire in their heads and slippery froth on thighs

Al Purdy

#10. I started writing when I was about thirteen.

Al Purdy

#11. Seeing the sky darken & the fields
turn brown & the lake lead-grey
as some enormous scrap of sheet metal
& wind grabs the world around the equator
I am most thankful then for knowing about
the little gold hairs on your belly

Al Purdy

#12. (My dove my little one
tonight there will be wine and drunken suitors
from the logging camps to pin you down
in the outlying lands of sleep
where all roads lead back to the home-village
and water may be walked on)

Al Purdy

#13. I don't mind a bit being labelled a suicide.

Al Purdy

#14. I don't think I do have a soul.

Al Purdy

#15. Things were so bad we ate rabbits that neighbours had run over and gave to us because they knew we were broke.

Al Purdy

#16. Genius is children"
it lives in far Centaurus
and star clusters beyond cold Orion
and sometimes visits earth
when there is no one home

Al Purdy