Franz Wright Quotes

#1. I wish you
all the aloneness you hunger for.

Franz Wright

#2. When I was nine, I started reading Homer. I would get up at four o'clock in the morning, before I had to go to school, in third or fourth grade, and, for several hours, I would read 'The Iliad' or 'The Odyssey.'

Franz Wright

#3. I believe one day the distance between myself and God will / disappear.

Franz Wright

#4. And I begin to learn.

Franz Wright

#5. We know there are poets who are chosen: by what or whom, we no more know than what lies beyond our final breath, or what caused a certain action which resulted in the fulfillment or the desecration and collapse of what we most cared for in life.

Franz Wright

#6. There is only one heart in my body, have mercy
on me.

Franz Wright

#7. Should each individual snowflake be held accountable for the avalanche?

Franz Wright

#8. And let me ask you this: the dead,
where aren't they?

Franz Wright

#9. Ressurection of the little apple tree outside
my window, leaf-
light of late
in the April
called her eyes, forget
forget
but how
How does one go
about dying?
Who on earth
is going to teach me
The world is filled with people
who have never died

Franz Wright

#10. The long silences need to be loved, perhaps more than the words which arrive to describe them in time.

Franz Wright

#11. I wish my father could be around.

Franz Wright

#12. Literature will lose, sunlight will win, don't worry.

Franz Wright

#13. Poetry, just because it is poetry, doesn't mean it is some kind of magic spell.

Franz Wright

#14. This
final and long
longed-for job:
to be unhappy
without doing
evil.

Franz Wright

#15. I write and have done so primarily for personal pleasure.

Franz Wright

#16. So we sit there
together
the mountain
and me, Li Po
said, until only the mountain
remains.

Franz Wright

#17. When I'm in certain moods, a conversation will start up in my head, and suddenly I'll realize that the language has reached a very high and interesting level, and then lines and stanzas will just kind of appear, full-blown.

Franz Wright

#18. What I myself experience is indescribable gratitude in the face of God's perpetual and preemptive love, a love which is not contingent upon requital or even belief in His existence.

Franz Wright

#19. Which is more puzzling, the existence of suffering or its frequent absence?

Franz Wright

#20. The poetic prose that most interests me is that of Henri Michaux.

Franz Wright

#21. There are people who recall my father as a saint and a monster. I'm quite sure I will share the same fate.

Franz Wright

#22. The road to Emmaus is this world.

Franz Wright

#23. But if they were condmened to suffer this unending torment, sooner or later wouldn't they become the holy?

Franz Wright

#24. Poem in other words may or may not result from inspiration but must (in reader and author alike) produce it

Franz Wright

#25. Poetry endures when it possesses passionate and primally sincere clarity in the service of articulating universal human concerns.

Franz Wright

#26. It's hard for me to grasp that I might somehow be my father's equal in any way.

Franz Wright

#27. I basked in you;
I loved you, helplessly, with a boundless tongue-tied love.
And death doesn't prevent me from loving you.
Besides,
in my opinion you aren't dead.
(I know dead people, and you are not dead.)

Franz Wright

#28. I am in no way different from anyone else, that my predicament, my sense of aloneness or isolation may be precisely what unites me with everyone.

Franz Wright

#29. If only I could tell someone.
The humiliation I go through
when I think of my past
can only be described as grace.
We are created by being destroyed.

Franz Wright

#30. Beckett's 'Stories and Texts for Nothing' is probably my favorite book.

Franz Wright

#31. Everyone agrees.
The dead singers have the best voices.
At four o'clock in the morning
the dead singers have the best voices.

Franz Wright

#32. The moon's a dead rock, but I still like the word,
so black in its white space.
[ ... ]
what can we say to the
moon except You again?
You again.

Franz Wright

#33. This is no occupation for an adult who can look other adults in the eye, carry his own weight, and count himself one of them.

Franz Wright

#34. And the night smells like snow. Walking home for a moment you almost believe you could start again. And an intense love rushes to your heart, and hope. It's unendurable, unendurable

Franz Wright

#35. No one is a stranger, this whole world is your home

Franz Wright

#36. I've always envied people who compose music or paint, because they don't have to be bothered with the sort of crude mess that language normally is, in everyday life and in the way we use it.

Franz Wright

#37. We are created by being destroyed.

Franz Wright

#38. Furless now, upright, My banished
and experimental
child
You said, though your own heart condemn you
I do not condemn you.

Franz Wright

#39. For about twenty years, if I managed to write ten or twelve poems in a year; I considered that a pretty successful year, but I wrote 'The Beforelife' within a year.

Franz Wright