Dana Gioia Short Quotes

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We are not as we were. Death has been our pentecost.

Dana Gioia
The writer needs good works—good literary ones (33).

Dana Gioia
"It is time to renovate and reoccupy our own tradition" (35).

Dana Gioia
Old empires always appeal to modern poets more than new ones.

Dana Gioia
Two great poets are stronger than two thousand mediocrities (31).

Dana Gioia
Poetry is not a creed or dogma. It is a special way of speaking and listening.

Dana Gioia
We necessarily bring the whole of our hairy and heavy humanity to worship (29).

Dana Gioia
Money. You don't know where it's been,
but you put it where your mouth is.
And it talks.

Dana Gioia
To speak from a particular place and time is not provincialism but part of a writer's identity.

Dana Gioia
"The Catholic writer really needs only three things to succeed: faith, hope and ingenuity" (31).

Dana Gioia
What we conceal
Is always more than what we dare confide.
Think of the letters that we write our dead.

Dana Gioia
"If Catholic literature has a central theme, it is the difficult journey of the sinner toward redemption" (14).

Dana Gioia
Everyone enjoys stories of double lives and secret identities. Children have Superman; intellectuals have Wallace Stevens.

Dana Gioia
Contemporary American literary culture has privileged the mind over the body. The soul has become embarrassed by the senses.

Dana Gioia
"A New York leftist and an Alabama Pentecostal may not agree on much, but too often they share a dislike of Catholics" (22).

Dana Gioia
"If the soul of Roman Catholicism is to be found in partisan politics, then it's probably time to shutter up the chapel" (24).

Dana Gioia
The music that of common speech
but slanted so that each detail
sounds unexpected as a sharp
inserted in a simple scale.

Dana Gioia
In America, the term younger poet is applied with chivalric liberality. It can be used to describe anyone not yet collecting a Social Security pension.

Dana Gioia
Being so deeply rooted in one place and culture allows a genuine writer to experiment wildly with the material without ever losing touch with its essence.

Dana Gioia
Dante and Hopkins, Mozart and Palestrina, Michelangelo and El Greco, Bramante and Gaudi, have brought more souls to God than all the preachers of Texas (29).

Dana Gioia
The new year always brings us what we want Simply by bringing us along—to see A calendar with every day uncrossed, A field of snow without a single footprint.

Dana Gioia
My blessed California, you are so wise.
You render death abstract, efficient, clean.
Your afterlife is only real estate,
And in his kingdom Death must stay unseen.

Dana Gioia
Most editors run poems and poetry reviews the way a prosperous Montana rancher might keep a few buffalo around — not to eat the endangered creatures but to display them for tradition's sake.

Dana Gioia
"Between 1945 and 1965 Catholic novelists and poets received 11 Pulitzer Prizes and 5 National Book Awards (6 NBAs if one counts O'Connor's posthumously published Complete Stories in 1972)" (18).

Dana Gioia
This is not work
but a kind of workmanship.
First out of paper, then from the body.
To provoke thought into form,
molded according to a measure.
I think of a tailor
who is his own fabric.

Dana Gioia