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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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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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How shall the heart be reconciled / To its feast of losses?
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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.
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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
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We have to learn how to live with our frailties. The best people I know are inadequate and unashamed.
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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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
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Poetry today is easier to write but harder to remember.
Stanley Kunitz
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Poetry is the enemy of the poem.
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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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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Forward my mail to Mars.
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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I can hardly wait for tomorrow, it means a new life for me each and every day.
Stanley Kunitz
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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
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A poem has secrets that the poet knows nothing of.
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
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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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The ear writes my poems, not the mind.
Stanley Kunitz