Quotes from James Dickey

Flight is the only truly new sensation than men have achieved in modern history.

She was the Judy Garland of American poetry.

I think Ginsberg has done more harm to the craft that I honor and live by than anybody else by reducing it to a kind of mean that enables the most dubious practitioners to claim they are poets because they think, If the kind of thing Ginsberg does is poetry, I can do that.

And I to my motorcycle Parked like the soul of the junkyard Restored, a bicycle fleshed With power, and tore off Up Highway 106, continually Drunk on the wind in my mouth, Wringing the handlebar for speed, Wild to be wreckage forever.

We have all been in roomsWe cannot die in.

The New York Quarterly is an amazing, intelligent, crazy, creative, strange, and indispensable magazine.

I want a fever, in poetry: a fever, and tranquillity.

A shudder of joy runs upThe trunk: the needles tingle;One bird uncontrollably cries.The wind changes round, and I stirWithin another's life. Whose life?

Nothing can comeof this nothing can comeOf us: of me with my grim techniquesOr you who have sealed your wombWith a ring of convulsive rubber:Although we come together,Nothing will come of us.

All families lie together, though some are burned alive.The others try to feelFor them. Some can, it is often said.

Words go together in zillions of ways. Some ways go deep, and some ways go shallow.

There is no whole truth, but this is what we have, And it goes on Beyond impact, beyond reach, beyond recall…

In our technology-dominated world, the value of literature is getting harder and harder to maintain, but it must be maintained if we're going to have any humanity left at all.

There was nothing in common, in the way he was lying, with any of the positions I had seen him in while he was alive, until I remembered the pose by the river in which I had most wanted to kill him. He now had that same relaxed, enjoying look of belonging anywhere he happened to be, and particularly in the woods.

A poet is someone who stands outside in the rain hoping to be struck by lightning.

What you have to realize when you write poetry, or if you love poetry, is that poetry is just naturally the greatest god damn thing that ever was in the whole universe

I go out on the side of a hill, maybe hunting deer, and sit there and see the shadow of night coming over the hill, and I can swear to you there is a part of me that is absolutely untouched by anything civilized. There's a part of me that has never heard of a telephone.

I need about one hundred fifty drafts of a poem to get it right, and fifty more to make it sound spontaneous.

I was standing in the most absolute aloneness that I had ever been given.

What a view, i said again. The river was blank and mindless with beauty. It was the most glorious thing I have ever seen. But it was not seeing, really. For once it was not just seeing. It was beholding. I beheld the river in its icy pit of brightness, in its far-below sound and indifference, in its large coil and tiny points and flashes of the moon, in its long sinuous form, in its uncomprehending consequence.

With my foot on the water, I feel The moon outside, Take on the utmost of its power. I rise and go out through the boats. I set my broad soul upon silver, On the skin of the sky, on the moonlight, Stepping outward from the earth onto water In quest of the miracle.

A poet is someone who stands outside in the rain hoping to be struck by lightening.

In his mind he was always leaving, always going somewhere, always doing something else.

The body is the one thing you can't fake; it's just got to be there.