Dana Gioia Quotes

#1. Poetry offers a way of understanding and expressing existence that is fundamentally different from conceptual thought.

Dana Gioia

#2. Art is an irreplaceable way of understanding and expressing the world,

Dana Gioia

#3. We offer you the landscape of your birth
Exquisite and despoiled. We all share blame.
We cannot ask forgiveness of the earth
For killing what we cannot even name.

Dana Gioia

#4. This is a prayer, inchoate and unfinished, for you, my love, my loss, my lesion, a rosary of words to count out time's illusions, all the minutes, hours, days the calendar compounds as if the past existed somewhere like an inheritance still waiting to be claimed.

Dana Gioia

#5. What we conceal Is always more than what we dare confide. Think of the letters that we write our dead.

Dana Gioia

#6. This last mute touch that lingers is farewell.

Dana Gioia

#7. The purpose of arts education is not to produce more artists, though that is a byproduct. The real purpose of arts education is to create complete human beings capable of leading successful and productive lives in a free society.

Dana Gioia

#8. The new year always brings us what we want Simply by bringing us along-to see A calendar with every day uncrossed, A field of snow without a single footprint.

Dana Gioia

#9. There are some truths about life that can be expressed only as stories, or songs, or images. Art delights, instructs, consoles. It educates our emotions.

Dana Gioia

#10. Even if great poetry continues to be written, it has retreated from the center of literary life. Though supported by a loyal coterie, poetry has lost the confidence that it speaks to and for the general culture.

Dana Gioia

#11. O Suburbs of Despair
where nothing but the weather ever changes!

Dana Gioia

#12. We are not as we were. Death has been our pentecost.

Dana Gioia

#13. The daylight needs no praise, and so we praise it always- greater than ourselves and all the airy words we summon.

Dana Gioia

#14. Teach us the names of what we have destroyed.

Dana Gioia

#15. Once an author finishes a poem, he becomes merely another reader. I may remember what I intended to put into a text, but what matters is what a reader actually finds there which is usually something both more and less than the poet planned.

Dana Gioia

#16. My blessed California, you are so wise. You render death abstract, efficient, clean. Your afterlife is only real estate, And in his kingdom Death must stay unseen.

Dana Gioia

#17. Being so deeply rooted in one place and culture allows a genuine writer to experiment wildly with the material without ever losing touch with its essence.

Dana Gioia

#18. How many voices have escaped you until now, the venting furnace, the floorboards underfoot, the steady accusations of the clock numbering the minutes no one will mark. The terrible clarity this moment brings, the useless insight, the unbroken dark.

Dana Gioia

#19. What if we had walked a different path one day, would some small incident have nudged us elsewhere the way a pebble tossed into a brook might change the course a hundred miles downstream?

Dana Gioia

#20. Money. You don't know where it's been, but you put it where your mouth is. And it talks!

Dana Gioia

#21. Old empires always appeal to modern poets more than new ones.

Dana Gioia

#22. Poetry is not a creed or dogma. It is a special way of speaking and listening.

Dana Gioia

#23. In America, the term younger poet is applied with chivalric liberality. It can be used to describe anyone not yet collecting a Social Security pension.

Dana Gioia

#24. It seems to me that awakening to the full potential of what your life might be - beyond the possibilities of your own family, your own class, your own race, your own neighborhood - that is one of the great gifts that art affords.

Dana Gioia

#25. And memory insists on pining
For places it never went,
As if life would be happier
Just by being different.

Dana Gioia

#26. To speak from a particular place and time is not provincialism but part of a writer's identity.

Dana Gioia

#27. Everyone enjoys stories of double lives and secret identities. Children have Superman; intellectuals have Wallace Stevens.

Dana Gioia

#28. Yet the stones remain less real to those who cannot name them, or read the mute syllables graven in silica. To see a red stone is less than seeing it as jasper metamorphic quartz, cousin to the flint the Kiowa carved as arrowheads. To name is to know and remember.

Dana Gioia

#29. In an age of global standardization, regional voices also remind both writer and reader that no life is lived generically. If the purpose of literature is truly, as the ancients insisted, to instruct and delight, then what better to understand and enjoy than the here and the now ?

Dana Gioia

#30. The music that of common speech but slanted so that each detail sounds unexpected as a sharp inserted in a simple scale.

Dana Gioia

#31. Poetry speaks most effectively and inclusively (whether in free or formal verse) when it recognizes its connection - without apology - to its musical and ritualistic origins.

Dana Gioia