Stanley Kunitz - Lives Quotes

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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

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 heart breaks and breaks and lives by breaking it is necessary to go through dark and deeper dark and not to turn

Stanley Kunitz

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