Kunitz Quotes & Sayings

Transformations
All night he ran, his body air,
But that was in another year.
Lately the answered shape of his laughter,
The shape of his smallest word, is fire.
He who is a fierce young crier
Of poems will be as tranquil as water,
Keeping, in sunset glow, the pure
Image of limitless desire;
Then enter earth and come to be,
Inch by inch, geography. — Stanley Kunitz

In every house of marriage there's room for an interpreter. — Stanley Kunitz

Poetry is language surprised in the act of changing into meaning. — Stanley Kunitz

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

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

It is my heart that's late,
it is my song that's flown. — Stanley Kunitz

What business, said Priscilla's look more plainly than any words, what business had people to walk into other people's cottages in such a manner? She stood quite still, and scrutinized Mrs. Morrison with the questioning expression she used to find so effective in Kunitz days when confronted by a person inclined to forget which, exactly, was his proper place. But Mrs. Morrison knew nothing of Kunitz, and the look lost half its potency without its impressive background. Besides, the lady was not one to notice things so slight as looks; to keep her in her proper place you would have needed sledge-hammers. — Elizabeth Von Arnim

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

I like an ending that's both a door and a window. — Stanley Kunitz

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

The unconscious creates, the ego edits. — Stanley Kunitz

Be what you are. Give What is yours to give. Have Style. Dare. — Stanley Kunitz

Live in the layers,
not on the litter. — Stanley Kunitz

What makes the engine go?
Desire, desire, desire. — Stanley Kunitz

We have to learn how to live with our frailties. The best people I know are inadequate and unashamed. — Stanley Kunitz

I refuse to turn to theology to justify the life or redeem it. There is a question always of the connection to the eternal. I say to myself above all, keep alive your conviction that there are sacred elements in the life in the practice of the life that must be respected. But the conviction in the existence of the sacred does not necessarily imply that you need to believe in a creator, because we are the ones that made the sacred. — Stanley Kunitz

The universe is a continuous web. Touch it at any point and the whole web quivers. — Stanley Kunitz

Poetry is the enemy of the poem. — Stanley Kunitz

The thing that eats the heart is mostly the heart. — Stanley Kunitz

I can hardly wait for tomorrow, it means a new life for me each and every day. — Stanley Kunitz

When you look back on a lifetime and think of what has been given to the world by your presence, your fugitive presence, inevitably you think of your art, whatever it may be, as the gift you have made to the world in acknowledgment of the gift you have been given, which is the life itself ... That work is not an expression of the desire for praise or recognition, or prizes, but the deepest manifestation of your gratitiude for the gift of life. — Stanley Kunitz

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

There's grammar in my bones! — Stanley Kunitz

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

In a murderous time/the heart breaks and breaks/and lives by breaking. — Stanley Kunitz

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

Writer's block is a natural affliction. Writers who have never experienced it have something wrong with them. It means there isn't enough friction-that they aren't making enough of an effort to reconcile the contradictions of life. All you get is sweet monotonous flow. Writer's block is nothing to commit suicide over. It simply indicates some imbalance between your experience and your art, and I think that's constructive. — Stanley Kunitz

An old poet ought never to be caught with his technique showing. — Stanley Kunitz

Forward my mail to Mars. — Stanley Kunitz

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

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

The poem in the head is always perfect. Resistance begins when you try to convert it into language. — Stanley Kunitz

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

To conquer a piece of earth and make it as beautiful as one can dream of it being: That is art, too. A man cannot be separated from the earth. I come out of the garden every day feeling, oh, inspired in a way that one needs in order to convert the daily-ness of the life into something greater than that little life itself. — Stanley Kunitz

You must be careful not to deprive the poem of its wild origin. — Stanley Kunitz

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

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

The ear writes my poems, not the mind. — Stanley Kunitz

The sand whispered, Be separate, the stones taught me, Be hard. — Stanley Kunitz

A poem has secrets that the poet knows nothing of. — Stanley Kunitz

Deftly they opened the brain of a child, and it was full of flying dreams. — Stanley Kunitz

End with an image and don't explain. — Stanley Kunitz

How shall the heart be reconciled / To its feast of losses? — Stanley Kunitz

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

Whatever you choose to claim
of me is always yours;
nothing is truly mine
except my name. I only
borrowed this dust. — Stanley Kunitz

The supreme morality of art is to endure. — Stanley Kunitz

Poetry today is easier to write but harder to remember. — Stanley Kunitz

The first task of the poet is to create the person who will write the poems. — Stanley Kunitz

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

Certainly the modern poets I cherish most are disturbing spirits; they do not come to coo. — Stanley Kunitz

The poem comes in the form of a blessing, like rapture breaking on the mind. — Stanley Kunitz

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

I dance/for the joy of surviving, at the edge of the road. — Stanley Kunitz

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

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

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

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

My mother never forgave my father — Stanley Kunitz

Memory is each man's poet-in-residence. — Stanley Kunitz

Darling,
do you remember
the man you married?
Touch me,
remind me who I am. — Stanley Kunitz

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

Rhythm to me is essentially what Hopkins called the taste of self. I taste myself as rhythm. — Stanley Kunitz

A longing for the dance stirs in the buried life. — Stanley Kunitz