Top 34 Quotes & Sayings by Stephen Dunn

I think because my parents died in their early 50s, mid 50s, I always thought I would die young. And that's been both a useful thing and I suspect something that's haunted me a little bit.

Although I know it's unfair I reveal myself one mask at a time.

When I stop becoming, that's when I worry.

A true inner world is often revealed by style and sensibility as much as by what appears to be confession.

I wrote poetry for seven or eight years, maybe longer, before I could say I was a poet. If people asked, I'd say I wrote poetry; I wouldn't go further. I was in my mid- to late-thirties before I felt that I was a poet, which I think meant that I had begun to embody my poems in some way. I wasn't just a writer of them. Hard to say what, as a poet, my place in the world is. Some place probably between recognition and neglect.

Although I know it's unfair, I reveal myself one mask at a time.

A moment of something between acceptance and resignation of one's smallness in the world.

Oh abstractions are just abstract until they have an ache in them.

Isn't there a curious elegance in how one moment passes into another?

Everything I can't see / is at least as real as what I can.

A good many of my poems over the years have alluded to or taken on the political. Stevens has a line in one of his essays: "Reality exerts pressure on the imagination." Inevitably what is omnipresent in the culture exerts its pressure on our imaginations to respond to it, even if indirectly. But in this case the backdrop of 9/11, coincident with the breakup of a marriage, the finding of new love, some kind of personal cataclysm... all of those were forces informing the poems in some way.

I’ve had it with all stingy-hearted sons of bitches. A heart is to be spent.

I make myself up from everything I am, or could be. For many years I was more desire than fact. When I stop becoming, that’s when I worry.

Poetry does so many different things, it's difficult to say anything definitive about its role, which of course varies from culture to culture. It can range from being stories of the tribe to the private lyric, to being as W.H. Auden said "the clear expression of mixed feelings" to nonsense verse.

Connubial Because with alarming accuracy she’d been identifying patterns I was unaware of—this tic, that tendency, like the way I've mastered the language of intimacy in order to conceal how I felt— I knew I was in danger of being terribly understood.

Originality, of course, is what occurs when something new arises out of what's already been done.

exaggerated sunsets / splashed with rain, odd collisions / of roots, animals, seeds. / I didn't like a thing I saw, / so much effort to be strange.

Bring to me, it said, continual proof / you've been alive.

Perhaps basketball and poetry have just a few things in common, but the most important is the possibility of transcendence. The opposite is labor. In writing, every writer knows when he or she is laboring to achieve an effect. You want to get from here to there, but find yourself willing it, forcing it. The equivalent in basketball is aiming your shot, a kind of strained and usually ineffective purposefulness. What you want is to be in some kind of flow, each next moment a discovery.

There's a certain pleasure in violating the strictures of your education. The trick is, if you're going to explore ideas in a poem, to be suspicious of ideas and suspicious of your own mind at the same time. It's often a matter of orchestration and pacing. Of shaping some kind of dialectic flow.

I don't let a poem go into the world unless I feel that I've transformed the experience in some way. Even poems I've written in the past that appear very personal often are fictions of the personal, which nevertheless reveal concerns of mine. I've always thought of my first-person speaker as an amalgam of selves, maybe of other people's experiences as well.

What feeling feels like over time. An attempt to screw up what feeling feels like over time. Heartbreak and a high C.... The often welcome melodic lie.... The soul's undersong. The orchestration of randomness, a flirtation with the boundaries of silence and space.... a reminder that the self wants to disappear, be taken away from itself and returned.

I’ll always deny that I kissed her. I was just whispering into her mouth.

All good poems are victories over something.

I will try to disappoint you better than anyone ever has.

Better to be furious at one thing, become radiant with purpose. Better to love links and rhythms than all-embracing answers.

The world is always somewhat vicious. I take that as a given, but at various times in various circumstances that fact will be no more than a shadow or an echo behind some poem. Other times it will be more manifest. I try to write myself into articulations of half-felt, half-known feelings, without program. I'm always working toward getting my world and, hopefully, the world outside of me into a version that makes sense of it. Viciousness requires the same precision as love does.

I've tried to become someone else for a while, only to discover that he, too, was me.

I love what's left after love has been tested.

And the words we find are always insufficient, like love, though they are often lovely and all we have.

There are always the simple events of your life that you might try to convert into legend.

Altruism is for those who can't endure their desires. There's a world as ambiguous as a moan, a pleasure moan our earnest neighbors might think a crime. It's where we could live. I'll say I love you, Which will lead, of course, to disappointment, but those words unsaid poison every next moment. I will try to disappoint you better than anyone else has. --Mon Semblable

Now and again I feel the astonishment of being alive like this, in this body.

If the motive of writing is for some people a kind of exercise in dirty laundry, that's one thing. I've always thought of my poems as meant to be overheard, as I think all of these poems are. It seems to me if you get experience right, even your most painful or humiliating experiences - if you get those experiences right for yourself and make discoveries as you go along and find for them some formal glue - they will be poems for others.