Be what you are. Give What is yours to give. Have Style. Dare.
—Stanley Kunitz
Old myths, old gods, old heroes have never died. They are only sleeping at the bottom of our mind, waiting for our call. We have need for them. They represent the wisdom of our race.
—Stanley Kunitz
I can hardly wait for tomorrow, it means a new life for me each and every day.
—Stanley Kunitz
We have all been expelled from the Garden, but the ones who suffer most in exile are those who are still permitted to dream of perfection.
—Stanley Kunitz
Not that you need to be a saint to have visions worth talking about. The most effective prescription, I suspect, is to be a disciplined sinner. Perfection, as Valery noted, is work.
—Stanley Kunitz
The thing that eats the heart is mostly the heart.
—Stanley Kunitz
When you look back on a lifetime and think of what has been given to the world by your presence, your fugitive presence, inevitably you think of your art, whatever it may be, as the gift you have made to the world in acknowledgment of the gift you have been given, which is the life itself… That work is not an expression of the desire for praise or recognition, or prizes, but the deepest manifestation of your gratitude for the gift of life.
—Stanley Kunitz
The poem in the head is always perfect. Resistance starts when you try to convert it into language. Language itself is a kind of resistance to the pure flow of self.
—Stanley Kunitz
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Mark Van Doren American Poet, Critic
- Mark Strand American Poet, Essayist
- Conrad Aiken American Poet, Novelist
- Howard Nemerov American Poet, Novelist
- Robert Frost American Poet
- John Updike American Author
- Ezra Pound American Poet, Critic
- Norman Mailer American Novelist, Journalist
- Wallace Stevens American Poet
- James Dickey American Poet, Novelist
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