Stephen Dunn Quotes & Sayings

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

When I stop becoming, that's when I worry. — Stephen Dunn

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

Originality, of course, is what occurs when something new arises out of what's already been done. — Stephen Dunn

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

Where are we going?
It's not an issue of here or there.
And if you ever feel you can't
take another step, imagine
how you might feel to arrive,
if not wiser, a little more aware
how to inhabit the middle ground
between misery and joy.
Trudge on. In the higher regions,
where the footing is unsure,
to trudge is to survive. — Stephen Dunn

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

What feeling feels like over time. An attempt to screw up what feeling feels like over time. Heartbreak and a high C ... The often welcome melodic lie ... The soul's undersong. The orchestration of randomness, a flirtation with the boundaries of silence and space ... a reminder that the self wants to disappear, be taken away from itself and returned. — Stephen Dunn

That time I thought I was in love
and calmly said so
was not much different from the time
I was truly in love
and slept poorly and spoke out loud
to the wall
and discovered the hidden genius
of my hands
And the times I felt less in love,
less than someone,
were, to be honest, not so different
either.
Each was ridiculous in its own way
and each was tender, yes,
sometimes even the false is tender.
I am astonished
by the various kisses we're capable of.
Each from different heights
diminished, which is simply the law.
And the big bruise
from the long fall looked perfectly white
in a few years.
That astounded me most of all. — Stephen Dunn

There are always the simple events of your life that you might try to convert into legend. — Stephen Dunn

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

Everything I can't see / is at least as real as what I can. — Stephen Dunn

Perhaps basketball and poetry have just a few things in common, but the most important is the possibility of transcendence. The opposite is labor. In writing, every writer knows when he or she is laboring to achieve an effect. You want to get from here to there, but find yourself willing it, forcing it. The equivalent in basketball is aiming your shot, a kind of strained and usually ineffective purposefulness. What you want is to be in some kind of flow, each next moment a discovery. — Stephen Dunn

Oh abstractions are just abstract
until they have an ache in them. — Stephen Dunn

Anyone out without the excuse of a dog
should be handcuffed
and searched for loneliness. — Stephen Dunn

I will try to disappoint you better than anyone ever has. — Stephen Dunn

Bring to me, it said, continual proof / you've been alive. — Stephen Dunn

He didn't want to be
this thin man whose desires
were barely covered by skin,

standing absolutely still.
But everytime he moved
there was another place to go,

and everytime sadness would arrive
with its wonderful cocoon
not even that would last. — Stephen Dunn

And the words we find are always insufficient, like love, though they are often lovely and all we have. — Stephen Dunn

God knows nothing we don't know.
We gave him every word he ever said. — Stephen Dunn

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

May you turn
stone, my daughter,
into silk. May you make men better
than they are. — Stephen Dunn

Now and again I feel the astonishment of being alive like this, in this body. — Stephen Dunn

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

Altruism is for those who can't endure their desires. There's a world as ambiguous as a moan, a pleasure moan our earnest neighbors might think a crime. It's where we could live. 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.
Mon Semblable — Stephen Dunn

I'll always deny that I kissed her.
I was just whispering into her mouth. — Stephen Dunn

Although I know it's unfair, I reveal myself one mask at a time. — Stephen Dunn

Isn't there a curious elegance in how one moment passes into another? — Stephen Dunn

I love what's left after love has been tested. — Stephen Dunn

All good poems are victories over something. — Stephen Dunn

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