Top 40 Stanley Kunitz Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The heart breaks and breaks and lives by breaking it is necessary to go through dark and deeper dark and not to turn.”

— Stanley Kunitz

2. “The universe is a continuous web. Touch it at any point and the whole web quivers.”

— Stanley Kunitz

3. “I can hardly wait for tomorrow, it means a new life for me each and every day.”

— Stanley Kunitz

4. “Poetry is ultimately mythology, the telling of stories of the soul. The old myths, the old gods, the old heroes have never died. They are only sleeping at the bottom of our minds, waiting for our call. We have need of them, for in their sum they epitomize the wisdom and experience of the race.”

— Stanley Kunitz

5. “A longing for the dance stirs in the buried life.”

— Stanley Kunitz

6. “Poetry is the enemy of the poem.”

— Stanley Kunitz

7. “What makes the engine go? Desire, desire, desire.”

— Stanley Kunitz

8. “A poem has secrets that the poet knows nothing of.”

— Stanley Kunitz

9. “Be what you are. Give What is yours to give. Have Style. Dare.”

— Stanley Kunitz

10. “We have all been expelled from the Garden, but the ones who suffer most in exile are those who are still permitted to dream of perfection.”

— Stanley Kunitz

11. “Certainly the modern poets I cherish most are disturbing spirits; they do not come to coo.”

— Stanley Kunitz

12. “The poem in the head is always perfect. Resistance begins when you try to convert it into language.”

— Stanley Kunitz

13. “Darling, do you remember the man you married? Touch me, remind me who I am.”

— Stanley Kunitz

14. “End with an image and don’t explain.”

— Stanley Kunitz

15. “We have to learn how to live with our frailties. The best people I know are inadequate and unashamed.”

— Stanley Kunitz

16. “I associate the garden with the whole experience of being alive, and so, there is nothing in the range of human experience that is separate from what the garden can signify in its eagerness and its insistence, and in its driving energy to live – to grow, to bear fruit.”

— Stanley Kunitz

17. “I want to write poems that are natural, luminous, deep, spare. I dream of an art so transparent that you can look through and see the world.”

— Stanley Kunitz

18. “I dropped my hoe and ran into the house and started to write this poem, ‘End of Summer.’ It began as a celebration of wild geese. Eventually the geese flew out of the poem, but I like to think they left behind the sound of their beating wings.”

— Stanley Kunitz

19. “You must be careful not to deprive the poem of its wild origin.”

— Stanley Kunitz

20. “Poetry is language surprised in the act of changing into meaning.”

— Stanley Kunitz

21. “Memory is each man’s poet-in-residence.”

— Stanley Kunitz

22. “The unconscious creates, the ego edits.”

— Stanley Kunitz

23. “In every house of marriage there’s room for an interpreter.”

— Stanley Kunitz

24. “Deftly they opened the brain of a child, and it was full of flying dreams.”

— Stanley Kunitz

25. “The poem comes in the form of a blessing, like rapture breaking on the mind.”

— Stanley Kunitz

26. “I like an ending that’s both a door and a window.”

— Stanley Kunitz

27. “The supreme morality of art is to endure.”

— Stanley Kunitz

28. “The ear writes my poems, not the mind.”

— Stanley Kunitz

29. “A poet needs to keep his wilderness alive inside him. To remain a poet after forty requires an awareness of your darkest Africa, that part of yourself that will never be tamed.”

— Stanley Kunitz

30. “Forward my mail to Mars.”

— Stanley Kunitz

31. “The first task of the poet is to create the person who will write the poems.”

— Stanley Kunitz

32. “Poetry today is easier to write but harder to remember.”

— Stanley Kunitz

33. “My mother never forgave my father.”

— Stanley Kunitz

34. “A poet needs to keep his wilderness alive inside him.”

— Stanley Kunitz

35. “Not that you need to be a saint to have visions worth talking about. The most effective prescription, I suspect, is to be a disciplined sinner. Perfection, as Valery noted, is work.”

— Stanley Kunitz

36. “Some poems present themselves as cliffs that need to be climbed. Others are so defensive that when you approach their enclosure you half expect to be met by a snarling dog at the gate. Still others want to smother you with their sticky charms.”

— Stanley Kunitz

37. “An old poet ought never to be caught with his technique showing.”

— Stanley Kunitz

38. “When they shall paint our sockets gray And light us like a stinking fuse, Remember that we once could say, Yesterday we had a world to lose.”

— Stanley Kunitz

39. “Rhythm to me is essentially what Hopkins called the taste of self. I taste myself as rhythm.”

— Stanley Kunitz

40. “I stand on the terrible threshold and I see the end and the beginning in each others’ arms.”

— Stanley Kunitz

41. “The poet doesn’t so much disappear into the poem as become the poem. It is a concentration of faculties, of everything you are or hope to be, and at that moment you have a focus not only on your conscious life, but your unconscious world, and it is as much an expression of your whole being as is conceivable.”

— Stanley Kunitz

42. “The thing that eats the heart is mostly the heart.”

— Stanley Kunitz

43. “The sand whispered, Be separate, the stones taught me, Be hard.”

— Stanley Kunitz

44. “The poem in the head is always perfect. Resistance starts when you try to convert it into language. Language itself is a kind of resistance to the pure flow of self.”

— Stanley Kunitz

45. “There’s grammar in my bones!”

— Stanley Kunitz