Stanley Kunitz Quotes

21 Sourced Quotes

The poem comes in the form of a blessing — "like rapture breaking on the mind" — as I tried to phrase it in my youth. Through the years I have found this gift of poetry to be life-sustaining, life-enhancing, and absolutely unpredictable. Does one live, therefore, for the sake of poetry? No, the reverse is true: poetry is for the sake of the life.

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

Stanley Kunitz
I see lines of your spectrum shifting red, The Universe expanding, thinning out, Our worlds flying, oh flying, fast apart.

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

Stanley Kunitz
Poetry, I have insisted, is ultimately mythology, the telling of the stories of the soul.

Stanley Kunitz
You have become like us, disgraced and mortal.

Stanley Kunitz
Slime, in the grains of the State, like smut in the corn, from the top infected. Hatred made law.

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

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

Stanley Kunitz
On the royal road to Thebes I had my luck, I met a lovely monster, And the story's this: I made the monster me.

Stanley Kunitz
I recognize the gods' capricious hand
And write this poem for money, rage, and love.

Stanley Kunitz
That pack of scoundrels tumbling through the gate emerges as the Order of the State.

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
Liebchen, with whom should I quarrel except in the hiss of love, that harsh, irregular flame?

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
The thing that eats the heart is mostly heart.

Stanley Kunitz
Art is that chalice into which we pour the wine of transcendence.

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
Our lives are spinning out from world to world; the shapes of things are shifting in the wind. What do we know beyond the rapture and the dread?

Stanley Kunitz
After all,
we are partners in this land, co-signers of a covenant.
At my touch the wild braid of creation trembles.

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

Stanley Kunitz