30+ Stephen Dunn Quotes (Intense, Observant And Profound)

Stephen Dunn is an American poet from New York. He has published numerous collections of poetry, including Different Hours, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2001. His work often explores themes of family, faith, and the human condition.

Top 10 Stephen Dunn Quotes

1. I’ve had it with all stingy-hearted sons of bitches. A heart is to be spent.
2. Better to be furious at one thing, become radiant with purpose. Better to love links and rhythms than all-embracing answers.
3. Oh abstractions are just abstract until they have an ache in them.
4. 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.
5. I've tried to become someone else for a while, only to discover that he, too, was me.
6. 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.
7. A moment of something between acceptance and resignation of one's smallness in the world.
8. And the words we find are always insufficient, like love, though they are often lovely and all we have.
9. There are always the simple events of your life that you might try to convert into legend.
10. Although I know it's unfair I reveal myself one mask at a time.

Stephen Dunn Short Quotes

• Everything I can't see / is at least as real as what I can.
• I’ll always deny that I kissed her. I was just whispering into her mouth.
• Isn't there a curious elegance in how one moment passes into another?
• Bring to me, it said, continual proof / you've been alive.
• When I stop becoming, that's when I worry.
• All good poems are victories over something.
• Originality, of course, is what occurs when something new arises out of what's already been done.
• I love what's left after love has been tested.
• I will try to disappoint you better than anyone ever has.
• Now and again I feel the astonishment of being alive like this, in this body.

Stephen Dunn Famous Quotes And Sayings

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. — Stephen Dunn

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. — Stephen Dunn

I wrote poetry for seven or eight years, maybe longer, before I could say I was a poet. If people asked, I'd say I wrote poetry; I wouldn't go further. I was in my mid- to late-thirties before I felt that I was a poet, which I think meant that I had begun to embody my poems in some way. I wasn't just a writer of them. Hard to say what, as a poet, my place in the world is. Some place probably between recognition and neglect. — Stephen Dunn

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. — Stephen Dunn

If the motive of writing is for some people a kind of exercise in dirty laundry, that's one thing. I've always thought of my poems as meant to be overheard, as I think all of these poems are. It seems to me if you get experience right, even your most painful or humiliating experiences - if you get those experiences right for yourself and make discoveries as you go along and find for them some formal glue - they will be poems for others. — Stephen Dunn

A true inner world is often revealed by style and sensibility as much as by what appears to be confession. — Stephen Dunn

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 — Stephen Dunn

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. — Stephen Dunn

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. — Stephen Dunn

Poetry does so many different things, it's difficult to say anything definitive about its role, which of course varies from culture to culture. It can range from being stories of the tribe to the private lyric, to being as W.H. Auden said "the clear expression of mixed feelings" to nonsense verse. — Stephen Dunn

Life Lessons by Stephen Dunn

1. Stephen Dunn's work emphasizes the importance of living life to the fullest and cherishing the moments we have. He encourages readers to embrace the beauty of life, despite its difficulties, and to be grateful for the small moments of joy.
2. Through his work, Stephen Dunn encourages us to reflect on our own lives and to take the time to appreciate the people and experiences that make life meaningful.
3. Stephen Dunn's poetry also encourages us to be brave and honest in our pursuit of understanding ourselves and the world around us.