Top 28 Quotes & Sayings by Galway Kinnell

The first step... shall be to lose the way.

That's the way it is with poetry: When it is incomprehensible it seems profound, and when you understand it, it is only ridiculous.

Never mind. The self is the least of it. Let our scars fall in love.

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 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?

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.

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

Go so deep into yourself, you speak for everyone.

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

Is there a mechanism of death, that so mutilates existence no one, gets over it not even the dead?

Sometimes it is necessary To reteach a thing its loveliness

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?

Prose is walking; poetry is flying

Let our scars fall in love.

When I sleepwalk into your room, and pick you up, and hold you up in the moonlight, you cling to me hard, as if clinging could save us. I think you think I will never die, I think I exude to you the permanence of smoke or stars, even as my broken arms heal themselves around you.

Turn on the dream you lived through the unwavering gaze. It is as you thought: the living burn. In the floating days may you discover grace.

Perhaps poetry will be the canary in the mine-shaft warning us of what's to come.

I love to go out in late September among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries to eat blackberries for breakfast, the stalks very prickly, a penalty they earn for knowing the black art of blackberry-making; and as I stand among them lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries fall almost unbidden to my tongue, as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words like strengths or squinched, many-lettered, one-syllabled lumps, which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well in the silent, startled, icy, black language of blackberry - eating in late September.

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 bud stands for all things, even for those things that don't flower

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.

To me, poetry is somebody standing up, so to speak, and saying, with as little concealment as possible, what it is for him or her to be on earth at this moment

It is necessary to reteach a thing its loveliness, to put a hand on its brow of the flower and retell it in words and in touch it is lovely until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing.

I have always intended to live forever; but not until now, to live now.

I will find that special person who is wrong for me in just the right way.

Thats the way it is with poetry: When it is incomprehensible it seems profound, and when you understand it, it is only ridiculous.

Kiss the mouth which tells you, here, here is the world. This mouth. This laughter. These temple bones.

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.