Galway Kinnell Quotes

16 Sourced Quotes

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

Galway Kinnell
The rest of my days I spend wandering, wondering what, anyway, was that sticky infusion, that rank flavor of blood, that poetry by which I lived?

Galway Kinnell
The appeal to heaven breaks off.
The petals begin to fall, in self-forgiveness.
It is a flower. On this mountainside it is dying.

Galway Kinnell
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
In the half darkness we look at each other and smile and touch arms across his little, startlingly muscled body— this one whom habit of memory propels to the ground of his making, sleeper only the mortal sounds can awake, this blessing love gives again into our arms.

Galway Kinnell
I take a wolf's rib and whittle
it sharp at both ends
and coil it up
and freeze it in blubber and place it out
on the fairway of the bears.

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
The sheer blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.

Galway Kinnell
A boy's hunched body loved out of a stalk
The first song of his happiness, and the song woke
His heart to the darkness and into the sadness of joy.

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

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

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

Galway Kinnell
Goodbye,
you who are, for me, the postmarks again
of shattered towns--Xenia, Burnt Cabins,
Hornell--
their loneliness
given away in poems, only their solitude kept.

Galway Kinnell