Galway Kinnell Quotes

#1. Never mind. The self is the least of it. Let our scars fall in love

Galway Kinnell

#2. I have always intended to live forever; but not until now, to live now.

Galway Kinnell

#3. The secret title of every good poem might be 'Tenderness

Galway Kinnell

#4. Little sleep's-head sprouting hair in the moonlight,
when I come back
we will go out together,
we will walk out together among,
the ten thousand things,
each scratched too late with such knowledge, the wages of dying is love.

Galway Kinnell

#5. Is there a mechanism of death, that so mutilates existence no one, gets over it not even the dead?

Galway Kinnell

#6. The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don't flower

Galway Kinnell

#7. This one whom habit of memory propels to the ground of his making,
sleeper only the mortal sounds can sing awake,
this blessing love gives again into our arms.

Galway Kinnell

#8. I will find that special person who is wrong for me in just the right way.

Galway Kinnell

#9. Sometimes it is necessary To reteach a thing its loveliness

Galway Kinnell

#10. To me, poetry is somebody standing up, so to speak, and saying, with as little concealment as possible, what it is for him or her to be on earth at this moment

Galway Kinnell

#11. You live
under the Sign
of the Bear, who flounders through chaos
in his starry blubber:
poor fool,
poor forked branch
of applewood, you will feel all your bones break
over the holy waters you will never drink.

Galway Kinnell

#12. It is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing ...

Galway Kinnell

#13. What do they sing, the last birds
coasting down the twilight,
banking
across woods filled with darkness, their
frayed wings
curved on the world like a lover's arms
which form, night after night, in sleep,
an irremediable absence?

Galway Kinnell

#14. Turn on the dream you lived
through the unwavering gaze.
It is as you thought: the living burn.
In the floating days
may you discover grace.

Galway Kinnell

#15. The wages of dying are love.

Galway Kinnell

#16. Perhaps poetry will be the canary in the mine-shaft warning us of what's to come.

Galway Kinnell

#17. Isn't it worth missing whatever joy / you might have dreamed, to wake in the night and find / you and your beloved are holding hands in your sleep?

Galway Kinnell

#18. Prose is walking; poetry is flying

Galway Kinnell

#19. How many nights must it take
one such as me to learn
that we aren't, after all, made
from that bird that flies out of its ashes,
that for us
as we go up in flames, our one work
is
to open ourselves, to be
the flames?

Galway Kinnell

#20. Second-hand gloves will become lovely again, their memories are what give them the need for other hands. And the desolation of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness carved out of such tiny beings as we are asks to be filled; the need for the new love is faithfulness to the old.

Galway Kinnell

#21. That's the way it is with poetry: When it is incomprehensible it seems profound, and when you understand it, it is only ridiculous.

Galway Kinnell

#22. This happened to your father and to you, Galway-sick to stay, longing
to come up against the ends of the earth, and climb over.

Galway Kinnell

#23. Go so deep into yourself, you speak for everyone.

Galway Kinnell

#24. The first step ... shall be to lose the way.

Galway Kinnell

#25. The first step in the journey is to lose your way.

Galway Kinnell

#26. maybe there is no sublime; only the shining of the amnion's tatters.

Galway Kinnell

#27. When a group of people get up from a table, the table doesn't
know which way any of them will go.

Galway Kinnell

#28. For here, the moment all the spaces along the road between here and there - which the young know are infinite and all others know are not - get used up, that's it.

Galway Kinnell

#29. I start off but I don't know where I'm going; I try this avenue and that avenue, that turns out to be a dead end, this is a dead end, and so on. The search takes a long time and I have to back-track often.

Galway Kinnell

#30. Kiss the mouth
which tells you,
here,
here is the world.
This mouth. This laughter.
These temple bones.

Galway Kinnell

#31. Let our scars fall in love.

Galway Kinnell

#32. It was more or less late afternoon
and I came over a hilltop
and smack in front of me was the sunset.

Galway Kinnell