19 Quotes by Charles Wright

What makes us leave what we love best?What is it inside us that keeps erasing itselfWhen we need it most,That sends us into uncertainty for its own sakeAnd holds us flush there until we begin to love itAnd have to begin again?What is it within our own lives we decline to liveWhenever we find it, making our days unendurable,And nights almost visionless?I still don't know yet, but I do it.

That I isn't I anymore. It's someone else, the character who plays me, someone who's a better actor than I could ever be. I'm just the writer. Someone else is starring in my part. I remember him just well enough to try to write about him. A case of the negative sublime. I guess art's always after the fact. The real is imaginary, or imagined. Reconstitution, reconstruction, representation is all we're left with. Autobiography becomes biography in the end.

It’s good to know certain things:What’s departed, in order to know what’s left to come;That water’s immeasurable and incomprehensibleAnd blows in the airWhere all that’s fallen and silent becomes invisible;That fire’s the light our names are carved in.That shame is a garment of sorrow;That time is the Adversary, and stays sleepless and wants for nothing;That clouds are unequal and words are.

Our dreams are luminous, a cast fire upon the world.Morning arrives and that's it.Sunlight darkens the earth.

Meanwhile, the mole goes on with its subterranean daydreams,The dogs lie around like rugs

The music of memory has its own pitch,/which not everyone hears.

Arrange your unutterable alphabet, my man, / and hold tight. / It's all you've got, a naming of things, and not so beautiful.

We filigree and we baste. But what do the dead care for the fringe of words, Safe in their suits of milk? What do they care for the honk and flash of a new style? And who is to say if the inch of snow in our hearts Is rectitude enough?

Our dreams are luminous, a cast fire upon the world. Morning arrives and that’s it. Sunlight darkens the earth.