Charles Wright Quotes

#1. I want to be bruised by God.
I want to be strung up in a strong light and singled out.
I want to be stretched, like music wrung from a dropped seed.
I want to be entered and picked clean.

Charles Wright

#2. Arrange your unutterable alphabet, my man, / and hold tight. / It's all you've got, a naming of things, and not so beautiful.

Charles Wright

#3. A cicada whines,
his voice
Starting to drown through the rainy world,
No ripple of wind,
no sound but his song of black wings,
No song but the song of his black wings.
Such emptiness at the heart,
such emptiness at the heart of being,

Charles Wright

#4. I empty myself with light
Until I become morning.

Charles Wright

#5. Our dreams are luminous, a cast fire upon the world.
Morning arrives and that's it.
Sunlight darkens the earth.

Charles Wright

#6. November's a burn and an ache.

Charles Wright

#7. Poetry is the dark side of the moon,

Charles Wright

#8. If you want great tranquility/ It's hard work and a long walk

Charles Wright

#9. A moment that should have lasted forever and forever
Long over
it came and went before I knew it existed.
I think I know what it means,
But every time I start to explain it, I forget the words.

Charles Wright

#10. The music of memory has its own pitch,/which not everyone hears.

Charles Wright

#11. All forms of landscape are autobiographical,

Charles Wright

#12. How sweet the past is, no matter how wrong, or how sad.
How sweet is yesterday's noise

Charles Wright

#13. THINGS HAVE ENDS AND BEGINNINGS Cloud mountains rise over mountain range. Silence and quietness, sky bright as water, sky bright as lake water. Grace is the instinct for knowing when to stop. And where.

Charles Wright

#14. It may not be written in any book, but it is written
You can't go back,
you can't repeat the unrepeatable.

Charles Wright

#15. May we not be strangers in the lush province of joy

Charles Wright

#16. Some people have everything
Other people don't
But everything don't mean a thing
If it ain't the thing you want

Charles Wright

#17. Everyone knows this.
The voyage into the interior is all that matters,
Whatever your ride.

Charles Wright

#18. The life of this world is wind
Windblown we come, and windblown we go away.
All that we look on is windfall.
All we remember is wind.

Charles Wright

#19. Snub end of a dismal year,
deep in the dwarf orchard,
The sky with its undercoat of blackwash and point stars,
I stand in the dark and answer to
My life, this shirt I want to take off,
which is on fire ...

Charles Wright

#20. He looked like an angelic little boy who had been kicked out of his orphanage for failing to take part in group masturbation.

Charles Wright

#21. There is an otherness inside us
We never touch,
no matter how far down our hands reach.
It is the past,
with its good looks and Anytime, Anywhere ...
Our prayers go out to it, our arms go out to it
Year after year,
But who can ever remember enough?

Charles Wright

#22. Meanwhile, the mole goes on with its subterranean daydreams,
The dogs lie around like rugs

Charles Wright

#23. The ache for anything is a thick dust in the heart.

Charles Wright

#24. How many times can summer turn to fall in one life?

Charles Wright

#25. It's up there, and you can see the front of it. But what it is isn't what you're looking at. It's behind what you're looking at.

Charles Wright

#26. It's linkage I'm talking about, and harmonies and structures, And all the various things that lock our wrists to the past.

Charles Wright

#27. I write your name for the last time in this mist,
White breath on the windowpane,
And watch it vanish. No, it stays there.

Charles Wright