Gregory Orr Quotes & Sayings

#1. The way the word sinks
into the deep snow of the page

#2. Where would I be if not for your wild heart?
I ask this not from love, but selfishly -
how could I live? How could I make my art?

Gregory Orr

#3. Every breath is a resurrection.

Gregory Orr

#4. For Trisha
The truth's in myth not fact,
a story fragment or an act
that lasts and stands for all:
how bees made honey in a skull.

Gregory Orr

#5. That's crudely put, but
If we're not supposed to dance,
Why all this music?

Gregory Orr

#6. I believe in poetry as a way of surviving the emotional chaos, spiritual confusions, and traumatic events that come with being alive.

Gregory Orr

#7. And yet I swear
I love this earth
that scars and scalds,
that burns my feet.

And even hell is holy.

Gregory Orr

#8. Another way of saying "put it in the Book" would be that each poem we write pops up in the city of poetry, where anyone can visit it. Just as we visit the poems written before us. Go to Dickinson's house, or Li Po's or whomever we think has something to say to us that might help or be beautiful.

Gregory Orr

#9. When you're a young poet, reading is a search for your lost family.

Gregory Orr

#10. "Similar but not the same" - that's like the return of the beloved for me. And metamorphosis: the spirit of the beloved moving through things, not lingering long in any one thing or place, no matter how we might wish it.

Gregory Orr

#11. Poetry is the thread that leads us out of the labyrinth of despair and into the light.

Gregory Orr

#12. Somehow something has gone wrong with poetry in our culture. We have lost touch with its purpose and value, and in doing so, we have lost contact with essential aspects of our own emotional and spiritual lives.

Gregory Orr