Kay Ryan Quotes

United States, Poet
September 21, 1945

Kay Ryan is an American poet and educator. She has published seven volumes of poetry and an anthology of selected and new poems. From 2008 to 2010 she was the sixteenth United States Poet Laureate. In 2011 she was named a MacArthur Fellow and she won the Pulitzer Prize.

Also known as Educator

A lot of the job that one has to do as a writer is to protect the thing that doesn't match the world.

Kay Ryan
- World
- Job
- Writer
Action creates a taste for itself.

Kay Ryan
- Action
- Taste

Too much rain loosens trees. In the hills giant oaks fall upon their knees. You can touch parts you have no right to — places only birds should fly to.

Kay Ryan
- Rain
- Too Much
- Touch
A too closely watched flower blossoms the wrong color. Excess attention to the jonquil turns it gentian. Flowers need it tranquil to get their hues right. Some only open at midnight.

Kay Ryan
- Attention
- Flower
- Open
As for reality, I don't even have any interest in that word.

Kay Ryan
- Reality
- Interest
I enjoy an accumulating faith in weak forces - a weak faith, of course, easily shaken, but also easily regained - in what starts to drift: all the slow untrainings of the mind, the sift left of resolve sustained too long, the strange internal shift by which there's no knowing if this is the raod taken or untaken. There are soft affinities, possibly electrical; lint-like congeries; moonlit hints; asymmetrical pink glowy spots that are no the defeat of something, I don't think.

Kay Ryan
- Mind
- Faith
- Enjoy
I don't think any poetry is written that isn't primarily written to the self, in a way... I'm always talking to myself. But I seem to want somebody else to listen to it. I need, I do want an audience. So it's a strange thing. It's a very private conversation that then, you make public, kind of, like, the starfish flipping its stomach out.

Kay Ryan
- Myself
- Audience
- Public