Stephen Dunn Quotations

I think most of our lives are made up of both things visible and things interior, with a large chunk of them being interior.

The reaction has been overwhelming, and I'm just getting used to it. I think I actually, though, could get used to it for a long time.

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

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

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

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

All good poems are victories over something.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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

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

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