Kinnell Quotes & Sayings

It is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing ... — Galway Kinnell

I've always liked that Galway Kinnell poem. 'Wait, for now. Distrust everything, if you have to. But trust the hours. Haven't they carried you everywhere, up to now?'" She had a fine voice for reciting poetry, deep-timbered and slow. "Doesn't that just make everything better? — Brittany Cavallaro

The wages of dying are love. — Galway Kinnell

Perhaps poetry will be the canary in the mine-shaft warning us of what's to come. — Galway Kinnell

Isn't it worth missing whatever joy / you might have dreamed, to wake in the night and find / you and your beloved are holding hands in your sleep? — Galway Kinnell

Go so deep into yourself, you speak for everyone. — Galway Kinnell

I love to go out in late September among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries to eat blackberries for breakfast, the stalks very prickly, a penalty they earn for knowing the black art of blackberry-making; and as I stand among them lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries fall almost unbidden to my tongue, as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words like strengths or squinched, many-lettered, one-syllabled lumps, which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well in the silent, startled, icy, black language of blackberry - eating in late September. — Galway Kinnell

The secret title of every good poem might be 'Tenderness — Galway Kinnell

When a group of people get up from a table, the table doesn't
know which way any of them will go. — Galway Kinnell

Is there a mechanism of death, that so mutilates existence no one, gets over it not even the dead? — Galway Kinnell

The only sense we still respect is eyesight, probably because it is so closely attached to the brain. Go into any American house at random, you will find something - a plastic flower, false tiles, some imitation something - something which can be appreciated as material only if apprehended by eyesight alone. Don't we go sightseeing in cars, thinking we can experience a landscape by looking at it through glass? — Galway Kinnell

To me, poetry is somebody standing up, so to speak, and saying, with as little concealment as possible, what it is for him or her to be on earth at this moment — Galway Kinnell

It was more or less late afternoon
and I came over a hilltop
and smack in front of me was the sunset. — Galway Kinnell

I start off but I don't know where I'm going; I try this avenue and that avenue, that turns out to be a dead end, this is a dead end, and so on. The search takes a long time and I have to back-track often. — Galway Kinnell

For here, the moment all the spaces along the road between here and there - which the young know are infinite and all others know are not - get used up, that's it. — Galway Kinnell

I have always intended to live forever; but not until now, to live now. — Galway Kinnell

You live
under the Sign
of the Bear, who flounders through chaos
in his starry blubber:
poor fool,
poor forked branch
of applewood, you will feel all your bones break
over the holy waters you will never drink. — Galway Kinnell

Choice, and all its attendant energy, is a characteristic of youth. It is before one chooses that one feels desire and longing without fulfillment, which gives an edge to any artistic endeavor. Galway Kinnell recently said in an interview that a young poet has so many choices but an old poet must simply endure his chosen life. — Mary Ruefle

This happened to your father and to you, Galway-sick to stay, longing
to come up against the ends of the earth, and climb over. — Galway Kinnell

The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don't flower — Galway Kinnell

Second-hand gloves will become lovely again, their memories are what give them the need for other hands. And the desolation of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness carved out of such tiny beings as we are asks to be filled; the need for the new love is faithfulness to the old. — Galway Kinnell

Little sleep's-head sprouting hair in the moonlight,
when I come back
we will go out together,
we will walk out together among,
the ten thousand things,
each scratched too late with such knowledge, the wages of dying is love. — Galway Kinnell

Let our scars fall in love. — Galway Kinnell

Kiss the mouth
which tells you,
here,
here is the world.
This mouth. This laughter.
These temple bones. — Galway Kinnell

That's the way it is with poetry: When it is incomprehensible it seems profound, and when you understand it, it is only ridiculous. — Galway Kinnell

When I sleepwalk
into your room, and pick you up,
and hold you up in the moonlight, you cling to me
hard,
as if clinging could save us. I think
you think
I will never die, I think I exude
to you the permanence of smoke or stars,
even as
my broken arms heal themselves around you. — Galway Kinnell

The first step ... shall be to lose the way. — Galway Kinnell

What do they sing, the last birds
coasting down the twilight,
banking
across woods filled with darkness, their
frayed wings
curved on the world like a lover's arms
which form, night after night, in sleep,
an irremediable absence? — Galway Kinnell

Never mind. The self is the least of it. Let our scars fall in love — Galway Kinnell

This one whom habit of memory propels to the ground of his making,
sleeper only the mortal sounds can sing awake,
this blessing love gives again into our arms. — Galway Kinnell

Galway Kinnell came out with that wonderful big, breathy, hollow voice of his and read, for the first time in public, "The Bear." That poem impressed me so much that I memorized it. I used it for years when I taught in prisons. It's a powerful extended metaphor for what the writing life is really all about. It's a uniquely powerful poem about self-transformation, and that's what we're asking, really, beyond even our objection to the war. We're asking people to look at themselves and think about what might be possible with a little self-transformation. — Sam Hamill

I will find that special person who is wrong for me in just the right way. — Galway Kinnell

The first step in the journey is to lose your way. — Galway Kinnell

Prose is walking; poetry is flying — Galway Kinnell

maybe there is no sublime; only the shining of the amnion's tatters. — Galway Kinnell

How many nights must it take
one such as me to learn
that we aren't, after all, made
from that bird that flies out of its ashes,
that for us
as we go up in flames, our one work
is
to open ourselves, to be
the flames? — Galway Kinnell

Turn on the dream you lived
through the unwavering gaze.
It is as you thought: the living burn.
In the floating days
may you discover grace. — Galway Kinnell

Sometimes it is necessary To reteach a thing its loveliness — Galway Kinnell