Franz Wright Quotes & Sayings

I used to comfort myself with the idea of a book with serrated, detachable pages, so that you could read the thing the way it came and then shuffle the pages, like a giant deck of cards, and read the book in an entirely different order. It would be a different book, wouldn't it? It would be one of infinite books. — Franz Wright

What I would say is this: writing poems doesn't make you a poet. ... It is only with poetry, for some reason, that everyone wants to believe they can try their hand at it once in a while and be considered, can call themselves a poet. ... . It's a craft. It's an art. It's a skill. It is not therapy, and it is not compensation for terrible things in one's life. It is a thing in itself. You devote yourself to being an instrument of it, or you wander forever in the belief that it is a form of "self-expression." ... And I explained very clearly my opinion of what I think a poet, an artist is. Someone who puts this thing first. — Franz Wright

There is only one heart in my body, have mercy
on me. — Franz Wright

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

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

We are created by being destroyed. — Franz Wright

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

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

Which is more puzzling, the existence of suffering or its frequent absence? — Franz Wright

I wish you
all the aloneness you hunger for. — Franz Wright

I believe one day the distance between myself and God will / disappear. — Franz Wright

And I begin to learn. — Franz Wright

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

Think of it: a writer actually possesses the power to alter his past, to change what was once experienced as defeat into victory and what was once experienced as speechless anguish into a stroke of great good fortune or even something approaching blessedness, depending upon what he does with that past, what he makes out of it. — Franz Wright

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

... All will be
forgotten, everything you perceived, thought,
dreamed, hoped, remembered ... all the past
all the crawling fucking coughing chestpounding
nose-picking and deathward attempts
to make real some desperate desire, like
standing upright for a minute in the sun. The
sun that will die. — Franz Wright

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

EPITAPH Now I'm not the brightest knife in the drawer, but I know a couple things about this life: poverty silence, impermanence discipline and mystery The world is not illusory, we are From crimson thread to toe tag If you are not disturbed there is something seriously wrong with you, I'm sorry And I know who I am I'll be a voice coming from nowhere, inside
be glad for me. — Franz Wright

Poem in other words may or may not result from inspiration but must (in reader and author alike) produce it
— Franz Wright

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

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

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

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

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

No one is a stranger, this whole world is your home — Franz Wright

The road to Emmaus is this world. — Franz Wright

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

The poetic prose that most interests me is that of Henri Michaux. — Franz Wright

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

I wish my father could be around. — Franz Wright

Poetry endures when it possesses passionate and primally sincere clarity in the service of articulating universal human concerns. — Franz Wright

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

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

So we sit there
together
the mountain
and me, Li Po
said, until only the mountain
remains. — Franz Wright

Should each individual snowflake be held accountable for the avalanche? — Franz Wright

I write and have done so primarily for personal pleasure. — Franz Wright

This
final and long
longed-for job:
to be unhappy
without doing
evil. — Franz Wright

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

But if they were condmened to suffer this unending torment, sooner or later wouldn't they become the holy? — Franz Wright

And let me ask you this: the dead,
where aren't they? — Franz Wright

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

Poetry, just because it is poetry, doesn't mean it is some kind of magic spell. — Franz Wright

Beckett's 'Stories and Texts for Nothing' is probably my favorite book. — Franz Wright

Thank You for letting me live for a little as one of the
sane; thank You for letting me know what this is
like. Thank You for letting me look at your frightening
blue sky without fear, and your terrible world without
terror, and your loveless psychotic and hopelessly
lost
with this love — Franz Wright

Literature will lose, sunlight will win, don't worry. — Franz Wright