James Dickey Quotes

29 Sourced Quotes

And I to my motorcycle Parked like the soul of the junkyard Restored, a bicycle fleshed With power, and tore off Up Highway 106, continually Drunk on the wind in my mouth, Wringing the handlebar for speed, Wild to be wreckage forever.

James Dickey
There are so many selves in everybody, and just to explore and exploit one is wrong, dead wrong, for the creative person.

James Dickey
Poetry is a hazardous occupation, very hazardous. There may be bad things in there inside you that maybe you can't handle.

James Dickey
To be precise and reckless: that is the consummation devoutly to be wished.

James Dickey
A poet trains himself to stand out in a storm and be struck by lightning. If he is lucky enough to be struck six times, he becomes immortal. Randall Jarrell said it and he's right.

James Dickey
He can't imagine the result of the mission because he never saw it.

James Dickey
To have guilt you've got to earn guilt, but sometimes when you earn it, you don't feel the guilt you ought to have. And that's what The Firebombing is about.

James Dickey
I have just come down from my father.
Higher and higher he lies
Above me in a blue light
Shed by a tinted window.

James Dickey
The true feeling of sex is that of a deep intimacy, but above all of a deep complicity....

James Dickey
I saw for a blazing moment The great grassy world from both sides, Man and beast in the round of their need, And the hill wind stirred in my wool.

James Dickey
The body is the one thing you can't fake; it's just got to be there.

James Dickey
Here they are. The soft eyes open.
If they have lived in a wood
It is a wood.
If they have lived on plains
It is grass rolling
Under their feet forever.

James Dickey
Your moves are exactly right For a few things in this world.

James Dickey
Drunk on the wind in my mouth,
Wringing the handlebar for speed,
Wild to be wreckage forever.

James Dickey
She is watching her country lose its evoked master shape watching it lose
And gain get back its houses and peoples watching it bring up
Its local lights single homes lamps on barn roofs.

James Dickey
All families lie together, though some are burned alive. The others try to feel For them. Some can, it is often said.

James Dickey
With the plane nowhere and her body taking by the throat
The undying cry of the void falling living beginning to be something
That no one has ever been and lived through screaming without enough air.

James Dickey
These hunt, as they have done
But with claws and teeth grown perfect,
More deadly than they can believe.

James Dickey
And this is the house I pass through on my way To power and light.

James Dickey
Dust fanned in scraped puffs from the earth
Between his arms, and blood turned his face inside out,
To demonstrate its suppleness
Of veins, as he perfected his role.

James Dickey
We have all been in rooms
We cannot die in.

James Dickey
Nothing can come of this nothing can come
Of us: of me with my grim techniques Or you who have sealed your womb With a ring of convulsive rubber:
Although we come together,
Nothing will come of us.

James Dickey
What a view, i said again. The river was blank and mindless with beauty. It was the most glorious thing I have ever seen. But it was not seeing, really. For once it was not just seeing. It was beholding. I beheld the river in its icy pit of brightness, in its far-below sound and indifference, in its large coil and tiny points and flashes of the moon, in its long sinuous form, in its uncomprehending consequence.

James Dickey
Yet technique matters, even so. God uses it, for a buffalo is not a leopard.

James Dickey
It was something like love
From another world that seized her
From behind, and she gave, not lifting her head
Out of dew, without ever looking, her best
Self to that great need.

James Dickey
All day I climb myself
Bowlegged up those damned poles rooster-heeled in all
Kinds of weather.

James Dickey
A shudder of joy runs up The trunk: the needles tingle; One bird uncontrollably cries. The wind changes round, and I stir Within another's life. Whose life?

James Dickey
What you have to realize when you write poetry, or if you love poetry, is that poetry is just naturally the greatest god damn thing that ever was in the whole universe

James Dickey
Those that are hunted
Know this as their life,
Their reward: to walk
Under such trees in full knowledge
Of what is in glory above them,
And to feel no fear.

James Dickey