65 Quotes by Robert Pinsky

It can feel heavy with longing, and heavy with longing, in my mind, is preferable to hollow, which one also feels. If I'm heavy with longing, at least I have some idea of what I want.

A sentence is like a tune. A memorable sentence gives its emotion a melodic shape. You want to hear it again, say it—in a way, to hum it to yourself. You desire, if only in the sound studio of your imagination, to repeat the physical experience of that sentence. That craving, emotional and intellectual but beginning in the body with a certain gesture of sound, is near the heart of poetry.

This is one of the great human mysteries: why do works of art about bad things such as loss and deprivation make us feel good?

But someone I know is dying--And though one might say glibly, "everyone is,"The different pace makes the difference absolute.

Afternoon light like pollen. This is my language, not the one I learned.

The best anthology is the one each reader compiles, personally, according to his or her judgment, pleasure and awe." ~ Robert Pinsky, Singing School, 2013

When I was a kid, there was unhappiness in my family - was dealt with partly by escaping to television. And from a very early age, for whatever reason, I became scornful and resistant to and angry about that. And some other time in my life, I realized that there's a lot I loved in television.

When I was a teenager, just about the only thing I could do right was play music. In my graduating class, I was certainly not voted 'Most Literary Boy.' I can assure you I was not voted 'Mostly Likely to Succeed.' I was voted 'Most Musical Boy.' And the music led to the poetry.

New Jersey is the most poetic state: close enough to New York to be urban and cosmopolitan, far enough to be desirous and unsure; densely populated, but full of farms and woods, with the most deer of any state.