51 Quotes by Galway Kinnell

Second-hand gloves will become lovely again, their memories are what give them the need for other hands. And the desolation of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness carved out of such tiny beings as we are asks to be filled; the need for the new love is faithfulness to the old.

this one whom habit of memory propels to the ground of his making, sleeper only the mortal sounds can sing awake, this blessing love gives again into our arms.

Goodbye, you who are, for me, the postmarks again of shattered towns--Xenia, Burnt Cabins, Hornell-- their loneliness given away in poems, only their solitude kept.

the rest of my days I spend wandering: wondering what, anyway, was that sticky infusion, that rank flavor of blood, that poetry, by which I lived?

There are two versions to every poem – the crying version and the straight version

Little sleep's-head sprouting hair in the moonlight, when I come back we will go out together, we will walk out together among, the ten thousand things, each scratched too late with such knowledge, the wages of dying is love.

The first step in the journey is to lose your way.

I start off but I don't know where I'm going; I try this avenue and that avenue, that turns out to be a dead end, this is a dead end, and so on. The search takes a long time and I have to back-track often.

The only sense we still respect is eyesight, probably because it is so closely attached to the brain. Go into any American house at random, you will find something - a plastic flower, false tiles, some imitation something - something which can be appreciated as material only if apprehended by eyesight alone. Don't we go sightseeing in cars, thinking we can experience a landscape by looking at it through glass?