Stephen Dunn Quotes

#1. I think because my parents died in their early 50s, mid 50s, I always thought I would die young. And that's been both a useful thing and I suspect something that's haunted me a little bit.

Stephen Dunn

#2. Anyone out without the excuse of a dog
should be handcuffed
and searched for loneliness.

Stephen Dunn

#3. There are always the simple events of your life that you might try to convert into legend.

Stephen Dunn

#4. All good poems are victories over something.

Stephen Dunn

#5. I've had it with all stingy-hearted sons of bitches.
A heart is to be spent.

Stephen Dunn

#6. Better to be furious at one thing, become radiant with purpose. Better to love links and rhythms than all-embracing answers.

Stephen Dunn

#7. May you turn
stone, my daughter,
into silk. May you make men better
than they are.

Stephen Dunn

#8. Exaggerated sunsets / splashed with rain, odd collisions / of roots, animals, seeds. / I didn't like a thing I saw, / so much effort to be strange.

Stephen Dunn

#9. Bring to me, it said, continual proof / you've been alive.

Stephen Dunn

#10. Although I know it's unfair, I reveal myself one mask at a time.

Stephen Dunn

#11. I've tried
to become someone else for a while,
only to discover that he, too, was me.

Stephen Dunn

#12. I love what's left after love has been tested.

Stephen Dunn

#13. I'll always deny that I kissed her.
I was just whispering into her mouth.

Stephen Dunn

#14. He held her like a new woman
and what she felt
felt almost as good as love had,
and each of them called it love
because precision didn't matter anymore.

Stephen Dunn

#15. I'll say I love you,
Which will lead, of course,
to disappointment,
but those words unsaid
poison every next moment.
I will try to disappoint you
better than anyone else has.

Stephen Dunn

#16. When I stop becoming, that's when I worry.

Stephen Dunn

#17. Originality, of course, is what occurs when something new arises out of what's already been done.

Stephen Dunn

#18. Now and again I feel the astonishment of being alive like this, in this body.

Stephen Dunn

#19. Isn't there a curious elegance in how one moment passes into another?

Stephen Dunn

#20. Oh abstractions are just abstract
until they have an ache in them.

Stephen Dunn

#21. Everything I can't see / is at least as real as what I can.

Stephen Dunn

#22. I will try to disappoint you better than anyone ever has.

Stephen Dunn

#23. And the words we find are always insufficient, like love, though they are often lovely and all we have.

Stephen Dunn

#24. Connubial
Because with alarming accuracy
she'd been identifying patterns
I was unaware of - this tic, that
tendency, like the way I've mastered
the language of intimacy
in order to conceal how I felt
I knew I was in danger
of being terribly understood.

Stephen Dunn

#25. God knows nothing we don't know.
We gave him every word he ever said.

Stephen Dunn