20 Quotes by Gregory Orr

I believe in poetry as a way of surviving the emotional chaos, spiritual confusions, and traumatic events that come with being alive.

Beauty is like life itself: a dawn mist the sun burns off. It gives no peace, no rest.

I was born with a knife in one hand and a wound in the other.

If we’re not supposed to dance, Why all this music?

Another way of saying “put it in the Book” would be that each poem we write pops up in the city of poetry, where anyone can visit it. Just as we visit the poems written before us. Go to Dickinson’s house, or Li Po’s or whomever we think has something to say to us that might help or be beautiful.

With “poets dead and gone” as Keats says in “Mermaid Tavern” they are alive and talking to us and us to them.

To me, poetry is about survival first of all. Survival of the individual self, survival of the emotional life.

When you’re a young poet, reading is a search for your lost family.

I want to study The book of the world: Every vanishing page.