List of Stephen Dunn Quotes

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.

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.

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.

Bring To Me, It Said, Continual Proof / You've Been Alive.

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.

A True Inner World Is Often Revealed By Style And Sensibility As Much As By What Appears To Be Confession.

A Moment Of Something Between Acceptance And Resignation Of One's Smallness In The World.

The World Is Always Somewhat Vicious. I Take That As A Given, But At Various Times In Various Circumstances That Fact Will Be No More Than A Shadow Or An Echo Behind Some Poem. Other Times It Will Be More Manifest. I Try To Write Myself Into Articulations Of Half-felt, Half-known Feelings, Without Program. I'm Always Working Toward Getting My World And, Hopefully, The World Outside Of Me Into A Version That Makes Sense Of It. Viciousness Requires The Same Precision As Love Does.

There's A Certain Pleasure In Violating The Strictures Of Your Education. The Trick Is, If You're Going To Explore Ideas In A Poem, To Be Suspicious Of Ideas And Suspicious Of Your Own Mind At The Same Time. It's Often A Matter Of Orchestration And Pacing. Of Shaping Some Kind Of Dialectic Flow.

Although I Know It's Unfair, I Reveal Myself One Mask At A Time.

I Don't Let A Poem Go Into The World Unless I Feel That I've Transformed The Experience In Some Way. Even Poems I've Written In The Past That Appear Very Personal Often Are Fictions Of The Personal, Which Nevertheless Reveal Concerns Of Mine. I've Always Thought Of My First-person Speaker As An Amalgam Of Selves, Maybe Of Other People's Experiences As Well.

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.