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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
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Stanley Kunitz
Age: 100 †
Born: 1905
Born: July 29
Died: 2006
Died: May 14
Linguist
Poet
Translator
Writer
Worcester
Massachusetts
Stanley Jasspon Kunitz
Need
Suspects
Needs
Sinner
Work
Effective
Noted
Saint
Prescription
Perfection
Prescriptions
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Disciplined
Vision
Visions
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More quotes by Stanley Kunitz
In my darkest night, when the moon was covered and I roamed through wreckage, a nimbus-clouded voice directed me: Live in the layers, not on the litter. Though I lack the art to decipher it, no doubt the next chapter in my book of transformations is already written. I am not done with my changes.
Stanley Kunitz
In every house of marriage there's room for an interpreter.
Stanley Kunitz
Memory is each man's poet-in-residence.
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
It is my heart that's late, it is my song that's flown.
Stanley Kunitz
I can hardly wait for tomorrow, it means a new life for me each and every day.
Stanley Kunitz
I want to write poems that are natural, luminous, deep, spare. I dream of an art so transparent that you can look through and see the world.
Stanley Kunitz
End with an image and don't explain.
Stanley Kunitz
How shall the heart be reconciled / To its feast of losses?
Stanley Kunitz
I dance/for the joy of surviving, at the edge of the road.
Stanley Kunitz
I like an ending that's both a door and a window.
Stanley Kunitz
An old poet ought never to be caught with his technique showing.
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
Poetry is language surprised in the act of changing into meaning.
Stanley Kunitz
We have to learn how to live with our frailties. The best people I know are inadequate and unashamed.
Stanley Kunitz
A longing for the dance stirs in the buried life.
Stanley Kunitz
Poetry is the enemy of the poem.
Stanley Kunitz
The ear writes my poems, not the mind.
Stanley Kunitz
To conquer a piece of earth and make it as beautiful as one can dream of it being: That is art, too. A man cannot be separated from the earth. I come out of the garden every day feeling, oh, inspired in a way that one needs in order to convert the daily-ness of the life into something greater than that little life itself.
Stanley Kunitz
The supreme morality of art is to endure.
Stanley Kunitz
