Al Purdy Quotations

Things were so bad we ate rabbits that neighbours had run over and gave to us because they knew we were broke.

A collected poems' is either a gravestone or a testimonial to survival.

For me, the vast marvel is to be alive. For man, or for flowers or beast or bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly and perfectly alive.

I was desperately unhappy trying to adjust to the world.

At a certain age you're always uncertain how other people will take you.

I started writing when I was about thirteen.

I don't think I do have a soul.

I'm not religious in any formal sense, not in any God sense.

In my own mind, I was sort of a desperate kid.

Uneasily the leaves fall at this season, forgetting what to do or where to go; the red amnesiacs of autumn drifting thru the graveyard forest. What they have forgotten they have forgotten: what they meant to do instead of fall is not in earth or time recoverable the fossils of intention, the shapes of rot.

And it occurs to me that if I were aboard a rowboat floating in the middle of all the beer I've drunk in a lifetime, I'd never be able to see the shore.