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Live in the layers, not on the litter.

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
Litter
Layers
Live

More quotes by Stanley Kunitz

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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
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Certainly the modern poets I cherish most are disturbing spirits they do not come to coo.
Stanley Kunitz
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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
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We have to learn how to live with our frailties. The best people I know are inadequate and unashamed.
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The supreme morality of art is to endure.
Stanley Kunitz
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I dance/for the joy of surviving, at the edge of the road.
Stanley Kunitz
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It is my heart that's late, it is my song that's flown.
Stanley Kunitz
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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
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In every house of marriage there's room for an interpreter.
Stanley Kunitz
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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
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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
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Poetry today is easier to write but harder to remember.
Stanley Kunitz
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Darling, do you remember the man you married? Touch me, remind me who I am.
Stanley Kunitz
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Deftly they opened the brain of a child, and it was full of flying dreams.
Stanley Kunitz
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Poetry is ultimately mythology, the telling of stories of the soul. The old myths, the old gods, the old heroes have never died. They are only sleeping at the bottom of our minds, waiting for our call. We have need of them, for in their sum they epitomize the wisdom and experience of the race.
Stanley Kunitz
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A poem has secrets that the poet knows nothing of.
Stanley Kunitz
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An old poet ought never to be caught with his technique showing.
Stanley Kunitz
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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
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A longing for the dance stirs in the buried life.
Stanley Kunitz
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The first task of the poet is to create the person who will write the poems.
Stanley Kunitz