Kay Ryan Quotes

#1. A thing cannot be delivered enough times:
this is the rule of dogs for whom there are no fool's errands.
To loop out and come back is good all alone.
It's gravy to carry a ball or a bone.

Kay Ryan

#2. In the hills giant oaks
Fall upon their knees
You can touch parts
You have no right to

Kay Ryan

#3. The Self Is Not Portable
The self is not
portable. It
cannot be packed.
It comes sneaking
back to any place
from which it's
been extracted,
for it is nothing alone.
It is not an entity.
The ratio of self
to home: one part
in seventy.

Kay Ryan

#4. CROWN
Too much rain
loosens trees.
In the hills giant oaks
fall upon their knees.
You can touch parts
you have no right to
places only birds
should fly to.

Kay Ryan

#5. The Well or the Cup
How can
you tell
at the start
what you
can give away
and what
you must hold
to your heart.
What is
the well
and what is
a cup. Some
people get
drunk up.

Kay Ryan

#6. The only real access that I have to my mind is when I'm writing.

Kay Ryan

#7. Hide and Seek
It's hard not
to jump out
instead of waiting to be
found. It's
hard to be
alone so long
and then hear
someone come
around. It's
like some form
of skin's developed
in the air
that, rather
than have torn,
you tear.

Kay Ryan

#8. What keeps me writing is that I can only know through writing. My major sense organ is apparently a pencil.

Kay Ryan

#9. Small presses take chances. Chances are at the heart of all the literature we later know as great.

Kay Ryan

#10. Who would have guessed it possible that waiting is sustainable. A place with its own harvest.

Kay Ryan

#11. The day misspent,
the love misplaced,
has inside it
the seed of redemption.
Nothing is exempt
from resurrection.

Kay Ryan

#12. A certain kind of Eden holds us thrall.

Kay Ryan

#13. Action creates/a taste/for itself.

Kay Ryan

#14. Forgetting takes space./Forgotten matters displace/as much anything else as/anything else. We must/skirt unlabeled crates/as thought it made sense/and take them when we go/to other states.

Kay Ryan

#15. One can't work/by limelight.//A bowlful/right at/one's elbow//produces no/more than/a baleful/glow against/the kitchen table.//The fruit purveyor's/whole unstable/pyramid//doesn't equal/what daylight did.

Kay Ryan

#16. It isn't ever delicate to live.

Kay Ryan

#17. It's hard not
to jump out
instead of
waiting to be
found. It's
hard to be
alone so long
and then hear
someone come
around. It's
like some form
of skin's developed
in the air
that, rather
than have torn,
you tear.
Hide and Seek

Kay Ryan

#18. Gaps don't/just happen./There is a/generative element/inside them,/a welling motion/
as when cold/waters shoulder/up through/warmer oceans./And where gaps/choose to widen,/coordinates warp,/even in places/constant since/the oldest maps.

Kay Ryan

#19. I have tried to live very quietly, so I could be happy.

Kay Ryan

#20. It's important to have your private enjoyments because sometimes that's all we have.

Kay Ryan

#21.
Stardust is
the hardest thing
to hold out for.
You must make of yourself
a perfect plane-
something still
upon which
something settles-
something like
sugar grains on
something like
metal, but with
none of the chill.
It's hard to explain.
Stardust

Kay Ryan

#22. The satisfactions/of agreement are/immediate as sugar
/a melting of the/granular, a syrup/that lingers, shared/not singular./Many prefer it.

Kay Ryan

#23. A too closely watched flower/blossoms the wrong color./Excess attention to the jonquil/turns it gentian. Flowers/need it tranquil to get/their hues right. Some/only open at midnight.

Kay Ryan

#24. Even in climes/without snow/one cannot go/foward sometimes./Things test you./You are part of/the Donners or/part of the rescue:/a muleteer in/earflaps; a/formerly hearty/Midwestern farmer/perhaps. Both/parties trapped/within sight/of the pass.

Kay Ryan

#25. Failure: the renewable resource.

Kay Ryan

#26. I simply want to celebrate the fact that right near your home, year in and year out, a community college is quietly - and with very little financial encouragement - saving lives and minds. I can't think of a more efficient, hopeful or egalitarian machine, expect perhaps the bicycle.

Kay Ryan

#27. A lot of the job that one has to do as a writer is to protect the thing that doesn't match the world.

Kay Ryan

#28. As for reality, I don't even have any interest in that word.

Kay Ryan

#29. There are high places that don't invite us, sharp shapes, glacier-scraped faces, whole ranges whose given names slip off. Any such relation as we try to make refuses to take ... I'm giddy with thinking where thinking can't stick.
No Names

Kay Ryan