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, The Collected Poems

The universe is a continuous web. Touch it at any point and the whole web quivers.
― Stanley Kunitz

I can hardly wait for tomorrow, it means a new life for me each and every day.
― Stanley Kunitz

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

In a murderous time
the heart breaks and breaks
and lives by breaking.
― 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 gratitiude for the gift of life.
― Stanley Kunitz

I refuse to turn to theology to justify the life or redeem it. There is a question always of the connection to the eternal. I say to myself above all, keep alive your conviction that there are sacred elements in the life in the practice of the life that must be respected. But the conviction in the existence of the sacred does not necessarily imply that you need to believe in a creator, because we are the ones that made the sacred.
― 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, The Collected Poems

I dropped my hoe and ran into the house and started to write this poem, 'End of Summer.’ It began as a celebration of wild geese. Eventually the geese flew out of the poem, but I like to think they left behind the sound of their beating wings.
― Stanley Kunitz

A poet needs to keep his wilderness alive inside him. To remain a poet after forty requires an awareness of your darkest Africa, that part of yourself that will never be tamed.
― Stanley Kunitz

Some poems present themselves as cliffs that need to be climbed. Others are so defensive that when you approach their enclosure you half expect to be met by a snarling dog at the gate. Still others want to smother you with their sticky charms.
― Stanley Kunitz

Old myths, old gods, old heroes have never died.
They are only sleeping at the bottom of your mind,
waiting for our call. We have need for them.
They represent the wisdom of our race.
― 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

...few young poets are testing their poems against the ear. They're writing for the page, and the page, let me tell you, is a cold bed.
― Stanley Kunitz

Miss Murphy in first grade
wrote its name in chalk
across the board and told us
it was roaring down the storm tracks
of the milky way at frightful speed
and if it wandered off its course
and smashed into the earth
there'd be no school tomorrow.
― Stanley Kunitz

End with an image and don't explain.
― Stanley Kunitz, The Collected Poems