70 Quotes by Stanley Kunitz

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.

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.

We have to learn how to live with our frailties. The best people I know are inadequate and unashamed.

Deftly they opened the brain of a child, and it was full of flying dreams.

Be what you are. Give What is yours to give. Have Style. Dare.

The poem comes in the form of a blessing, like rapture breaking on the mind.

When you look back on a lifetime and think of what has been given to the world by your presence, your fugitive presence, inevitably you think of your art, whatever it may be, as the gift you have made to the world in acknowledgment of the gift you have been given, which is the life itself... That work is not an expression of the desire for praise or recognition, or prizes, but the deepest manifestation of your gratitiude for the gift of life.

The universe is a continuous web. Touch it at any point and the whole web quivers.

The heart breaks and breaks and lives by breaking it is necessary to go through dark and deeper dark and not to turn.