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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 can hardly wait for tomorrow, it means a new life for me each and every day.
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The supreme morality of art is to endure.
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End with an image and don't explain.
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Poetry today is easier to write but harder to remember.
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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.
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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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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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A longing for the dance stirs in the buried life.
Stanley Kunitz
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Certainly the modern poets I cherish most are disturbing spirits they do not come to coo.
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Poetry is the enemy of the poem.
Stanley Kunitz
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My mother never forgave my father
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It is my heart that's late, it is my song that's flown.
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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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I like an ending that's both a door and a window.
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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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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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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Poetry is language surprised in the act of changing into meaning.
Stanley Kunitz
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An old poet ought never to be caught with his technique showing.
Stanley Kunitz