Top 57 Kunitz Quotes
#1. No foreign sky protected me, no stranger's wing shielded my face. I stand as witness to the common lot, survivor of that time, that place. - ANNA AKHMATOVA, FROM POEMS OF AKHMATOVA, TRANSLATED BY STANLEY KUNITZ, WITH MAX HAYWARD
Kristin Hannah
#2. Not that you need to be a saint to have visions worth talking about. The most effective prescription, I suspect, is to be a disciplined sinner. Perfection, as Valery noted, is work.
Stanley Kunitz
#4. One critic wrote ... that my poems sounded as though they had been translated from the Hungarian. I don't know why, but somehow that made me feel quite lighthearted.
Stanley Kunitz
#7. Poetry is ultimately mythology, the telling of stories of the soul. The old myths, the old gods, the old heroes have never died. They are only sleeping at the bottom of our minds, waiting for our call. We have need of them, for in their sum they epitomize the wisdom and experience of the race.
Stanley Kunitz
#8. How shall the heart be reconciled / To its feast of losses?
Stanley Kunitz
#9. The heart breaks and breaks and lives by breaking it is necessary to go through dark and deeper dark and not to turn
Stanley Kunitz
#10. Some poems present themselves as cliffs that need to be climbed. Others are so defensive that when you approach their enclosure you half expect to be met by a snarling dog at the gate. Still others want to smother you with their sticky charms.
Stanley Kunitz
#12. I associate the garden with the whole experience of being alive, and so, there is nothing in the range of human experience that is separate from what the garden can signify in its eagerness and its insistence, and in its driving energy to live
to grow, to bear fruit.
Stanley Kunitz
#13. I dance/for the joy of surviving, at the edge of the road.
Stanley Kunitz
#14. In a murderous time/the heart breaks and breaks/and lives by breaking.
Stanley Kunitz
#15. When they shall paint our sockets gray
And light us like a stinking fuse,
Remember that we once could say,
Yesterday we had a world to lose.
Stanley Kunitz
#16. Whatever you choose to claim
of me is always yours;
nothing is truly mine
except my name. I only
borrowed this dust.
Stanley Kunitz
#17. Poetry is language surprised in the act of changing into meaning.
Stanley Kunitz
#18. We have to learn how to live with our frailties. The best people I know are inadequate and unashamed.
Stanley Kunitz
#19. Be what you are. Give What is yours to give. Have Style. Dare.
Stanley Kunitz
#20. Mind's acres are forever green: Oh, I
Shall keep perpetual summer here; I shall
Refuse to let one startled swallow die,
Or, from the copper beeches, one leaf fall.
Stanley Kunitz
#21. Miss Murphy in first grade
wrote its name in chalk
across the board and told us
it was roaring down the storm tracks
of the milky way at frightful speed
and if it wandered off its course
and smashed into the earth
there'd be no school tomorrow.
Stanley Kunitz
#22. Poetry today is easier to write but harder to remember.
Stanley Kunitz
#23. Certainly the modern poets I cherish most are disturbing spirits; they do not come to coo.
Stanley Kunitz
#24. Few young poets [are] testing their poems against the ear. They're writing for the page, and the page, let me tell you, is a cold bed.
Stanley Kunitz
#27. We have all been expelled from the Garden, but the ones who suffer most in exile are those who are still permitted to dream of perfection.
Stanley Kunitz
#28. I want to write poems that are natural, luminous, deep, spare. I dream of an art so transparent that you can look through and see the world.
Stanley Kunitz
#29. When your gaze slips off the mirror and onto how well you function in the world instead, you inevitably shift emphasis away from working out to change how you look and toward physical performance.
Daniel Kunitz
#30. When, on your dangerous mission gone,
You underrate our foes as dunces,
Be wary, not of sudden gun,
But of your partner at the dances.
Stanley Kunitz
#33. The universe is a continuous web. Touch it at any point and the whole web quivers.
Stanley Kunitz
#35. Toward dawn we shared with you
your hour of desolation,
the huge lingering passion
of your unearthly out cry,
as you swung your blind head
towards us and laboriously opened
a bloodshot, glistening eye,
in which we swam with terror and recognition.
Stanley Kunitz
#36. Darling,
do you remember
the man you married?
Touch me,
remind me who I am.
Stanley Kunitz
#37. An old poet ought never to be caught with his technique showing.
Stanley Kunitz
#38. You must be careful not to deprive the poem of its wild origin.
Stanley Kunitz
#39. The poem comes in the form of a blessing, like rapture breaking on the mind.
Stanley Kunitz
#40. The sand whispered, Be separate, the stones taught me, Be hard.
Stanley Kunitz
#42. A poem has secrets that the poet knows nothing of.
Stanley Kunitz
#43. A poet needs to keep his wilderness alive inside him. To remain a poet after forty requires an awareness of your darkest Africa, that part of yourself that will never be tamed.
Stanley Kunitz
#45. It is my heart that's late,
it is my song that's flown.
Stanley Kunitz
#46. I dropped my hoe and ran into the house and started to write this poem, 'End of Summer.' It began as a celebration of wild geese. Eventually the geese flew out of the poem, but I like to think they left behind the sound of their beating wings.
Stanley Kunitz
#47. Old myths, old gods, old heroes have never died.
They are only sleeping at the bottom of your mind,
waiting for our call. We have need for them.
They represent the wisdom of our race.
Stanley Kunitz
#49. I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
Stanley Kunitz
#50. The thing that eats the heart is mostly the heart.
Stanley Kunitz
#51. In every house of marriage there's room for an interpreter.
Stanley Kunitz
#52. The poem in the head is always perfect. Resistance begins when you try to convert it into language.
Stanley Kunitz
#53. Deftly they opened the brain of a child, and it was full of flying dreams.
Stanley Kunitz
#54. I can hardly wait for tomorrow, it means a new life for me each and every day.
Stanley Kunitz
#56. Rhythm to me is essentially what Hopkins called the taste of self. I taste myself as rhythm.
Stanley Kunitz
#57. The first task of the poet is to create the person who will write the poems.
Stanley Kunitz
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