Quotes from Franz Wright

I used to comfort myself with the idea of a book with serrated, detachable pages, so that you could read the thing the way it came and then shuffle the pages, like a giant deck of cards, and read the book in an entirely different order. It would be a different book, wouldn't it? It would be one of infinite books.

I've always envied people who compose music or paint, because they don't have to be bothered with the sort of crude mess that language normally is, in everyday life and in the way we use it.

When I'm in certain moods, a conversation will start up in my head, and suddenly I'll realize that the language has reached a very high and interesting level, and then lines and stanzas will just kind of appear, full-blown.

I believe one day the distance between myself and God will / disappear.

We know there are poets who are chosen: by what or whom, we no more know than what lies beyond our final breath, or what caused a certain action which resulted in the fulfillment or the desecration and collapse of what we most cared for in life.

What I myself experience is indescribable gratitude in the face of God's perpetual and preemptive love, a love which is not contingent upon requital or even belief in His existence.

I write and have done so primarily for personal pleasure.

The poetic prose that most interests me is that of Henri Michaux.

Beckett's 'Stories and Texts for Nothing' is probably my favorite book.

I basked in you; I loved you, helplessly, with a boundless tongue-tied love. And death doesn't prevent me from loving you. Besides, in my opinion you aren't dead. (I know dead people, and you are not dead.)

And the night smells like snow. Walking home for a moment you almost believe you could start again. And an intense love rushes to your heart, and hope. It's unendurable, unendurable

If only I could tell someone. The humiliation I go through when I think of my past can only be described as grace. We are created by being destroyed.

We are created by being destroyed.

The long silences need to be loved, perhaps more than the words which arrive to describe them in time.

And let me ask you this: the dead, where aren't they?

EPITAPH Now I'm not the brightest knife in the drawer, but I know a couple things about this life: poverty silence, impermanence discipline and mystery The world is not illusory, we are From crimson thread to toe tag If you are not disturbed there is something seriously wrong with you, I'm sorry And I know who I am I'll be a voice coming from nowhere, inside-- be glad for me.

literature will lose, sunlight will win, don't worry.

Should each individual snowflake be held accountable for the avalanche?

no one is a stranger, this whole world is your home

I believe one day the distance between myself and God will / disappear.

Thank You for letting me live for a little as one of the sane; thank You for letting me know what this is like. Thank You for letting me look at your frightening blue sky without fear, and your terrible world without terror, and your loveless psychotic and hopelessly lost with this love

Which is more puzzling, the existence of suffering or its frequent absence?

P.S. I close my eyes and see a seagull in the desert, high, against unbearably blue sky. There is hope in the past. I'm writing to you all the time, I am writing with both hands, day and night.

The moon's a dead rock, but I still like the word, so black in its white space. […] what can we say to the moon except You again? You again.