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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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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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End with an image and don't explain.
Stanley Kunitz
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Poetry is the enemy of the poem.
Stanley Kunitz
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How shall the heart be reconciled / To its feast of losses?
Stanley Kunitz
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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
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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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It is my heart that's late, it is my song that's flown.
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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Rhythm to me is essentially what Hopkins called the taste of self. I taste myself as rhythm.
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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Darling, do you remember the man you married? Touch me, remind me who I am.
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.
Stanley Kunitz
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Poetry is language surprised in the act of changing into meaning.
Stanley Kunitz
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Forward my mail to Mars.
Stanley Kunitz
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...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
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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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A poem has secrets that the poet knows nothing of.
Stanley Kunitz
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I like an ending that's both a door and a window.
Stanley Kunitz
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In every house of marriage there's room for an interpreter.
Stanley Kunitz