Galway Kinnell Quotes
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The first step... shall be to lose the way.
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Never mind. The self is the least of it. Let our scars fall in love.
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That's the way it is with poetry: When it is incomprehensible it seems profound, and when you understand it, it is only ridiculous.
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I take a wolf's rib and whittleit sharp at both endsand coil it upand freeze it in blubber and place it outon the fairway of the bears.
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When I sleepwalk into your room, and pick you up, and hold you up in the moonlight, you cling to me hard, as if clinging could save us. I think you think I will never die, I think I exude to you the permanence of smoke or stars, even as my broken arms heal themselves around you.
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Kiss the mouth which tells you, here,here is the world. This mouth. This laughter. These temple bones.
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Goodbye, you who are, for me, the postmarks again of shattered towns--Xenia, Burnt Cabins, Hornell--their loneliness given away in poems, only their solitude kept.
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I will find that special person who is wrong for me in just the right way.
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The sheer blue milken dreaminess spurting and shudderingfrom the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing beneath them:the long, perfect loveliness of sow.
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The appeal to heaven breaks off.The petals begin to fall, in self-forgiveness.It is a flower. On this mountainside it is dying.
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Prose is walking; poetry is flying...
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A boy's hunched body loved out of a stalkThe first song of his happiness, and the song wokeHis heart to the darkness and into the sadness of joy.
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I start off but I don't know where I'm going; I try this avenue and that avenue, that turns out to be a dead end, this is a dead end, and so on. The search takes a long time and I have to back-track often.
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...this one whom habit of memory propels to the ground of his making, sleeper only the mortal sounds can sing awake, this blessing love gives again into our arms.
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Turn on the dream you lived through the unwavering gaze. It is as you thought: the living burn. In the floating days may you discover grace.
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Sometimes it is necessary To reteach a thing its loveliness...
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Little sleep's-head sprouting hair in the moonlight, when I come back we will go out together, we will walk out together among, the ten thousand things, each scratched too late with such knowledge, the wages of dying is love.
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Perhaps poetry will be the canary in the mine-shaft warning us of what's to come.
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Let our scars fall in love.
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I have always intended to live forever; but not until now, to live now.
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The rest of my days I spend wandering: wondering what, anyway, was that sticky infusion, that rank flavor of blood, that poetry, by which I lived?
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It is necessary to reteach a thing its loveliness, to put a hand on its brow of the flower and retell it in words and in touch it is lovely until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing.
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I love to go out in late September among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries to eat blackberries for breakfast, the stalks very prickly, a penalty they earn for knowing the black art of blackberry-making; and as I stand among them lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries fall almost unbidden to my tongue, as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words like strengths or squinched, many-lettered, one-syllabled lumps, which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well in the silent, startled, icy, black language of blackberry - eating in late September.
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Is there a mechanism of death, that so mutilates existence no one, gets over it not even the dead?