A Quote by Stanley Kunitz

End with an image and don't explain. — © Stanley Kunitz
End with an image and don't explain.

Quote Topics

I often think about image, and image is something that - but in truth, the real artistic process, as I've understood it, is 95 percent intuitive, like seat-of-the-pants, at-the-moment decisions that you can't even explain, you know?
I don't like the idea of having a public image. In the end, you have an image of someone, which becomes true whether it is or not.
Darwinism doesn't explain where gravity comes from. It doesn't explain where thermodynamics comes from. It doesn't explain where the laws of physics come from. It doesn't explain where matter came from.
Darwinism doesn't explain where gravity comes from. It doesn't explain where thermodynamics comes from. It doesn't explain where the laws of physics come from. It doesn't explain where matter comes from.
I can't actually explain why my lines got shorter, but they did. Just as I can't explain why my early poems were 'all image' and my current ones are relatively abstract. The sense of the line changed with the theme, somehow my ear (or brain or heart/mind) fell in love with a short line and very very simple words.
The image of Earth from space transformed our view of ourselves. It is maybe the most important image that exists - because we can see ourselves in context in a way that otherwise would be really hard to explain. It should inspire us to wonder about it, to want to know everything we can about it and do everything we can to take care of it.
The image my work invokes is the image of good - not evil; the image of order - not chaos; the image of life - not death. And that is all the content of my constructions amounts to.
Ah, it is the fault of our science that it wants to explain all; and if it explain not, then it says there is nothing to explain.
I think a good poem should have some inscrutable part. You can't quite explain it. The poem can only explain itself to a certain limit and at that point you enter into a little bit of mystery. That for me is the perfect poem: to begin in clarity and to end in mystery.
Every man carries within himself the eternal image of woman, not the image of this or that particular woman, but a definite feminine image. This image is fundamentally unconscious, a hereditary factor of primordial origin.
A story is an end in itself. It is not written to teach, sell, explain or destroy anything. It is not written even to entertain. It is written as a man is born - an organic whole, dictated only by its own laws and its own necessity - an end in itself, not a means to an end.
I make one image—though 'make' is not the right word; I let, perhaps, an image be 'made' emotionally in me and then apply to it what intellectual & critical forces I possess—let it breed another, let that image contradict the first, make, of the third image bred out of the other two together, a fourth contradictory image, and let them all, within my imposed formal limits, conflict.
Moreover, a book is not made of sentences laid end to end, but of sentences built, if an image helps, into arcades or domes.
Power may be at the end of a gun, but sometimes it's also at the end of the shadow or the image of a gun.
The image can only be studied through the image, by dreaming images as they gather in reverie. It is a non-sense to claim to study imagination objectively since one really receives the image only if he admires it. Already in comparing one image to another, one runs the risk of losing participation in its individuality.
People say that steadiness of mind is an end; no, it is a beginning. I am there; I can explain everything up to that point. Then I struggle to discover what comes after, so this steadiness is not an end, it is the beginning and the instrument.
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