Quotes from James Dickey

Up telephone poles, Which rear, half out of leavage As though they would shriek Like things smothered by their own Green, mindless, unkillable ghosts. In Georgia, the legend says That you must close your windows At night to keep it out of the house The glass is tinged with green, even so, As the tendrils crawl over the fields. The night the Kudzu has Your pasture, you sleep like the dead. Silence has grown oriental And you cannot step upon the ground... ALL: Kudzu by James Dickey

I had begun to suspect, however, that there is a poet—or a kind of poet—buried in every human being like Ariel in his tree, and that the people whom we are pleased to call poets are only those who have felt the need and contrived the means to release this spirit from its prison

I believe that the American poet ought to be a tough son of a bitch. He sought to hold his own in this culture on his own terms and not compromise under any circumstances.

After four hours I passed slowly from the country of 'nine-fingered people and prepare to meet thy God' into the drive-ins and motels and Homes of the Whopper but all I could see was the river.

I had the feeling that if it were perfectly quiet, if I could hear nothing, I would never wake up. Something in the world had to pull me back, for every night I went down deep, and if I had any sensation during sleep, it was of going deeper and deeper, trying to reach a point, a line or border.

Detachment produces a peculiar state of mind. Maybe that's the worst sentence of all, to be deprived of feeling what a human being ought to be entitled to feel.

Not a good man. Drinks too much in an uncreative way.

Something or other was being made good. I touched the knife hilt at my side, and remembered that all men were once boys, and that boys are always looking for ways to become men. Some of the ways are easy, too; all you have to do is be satisfied that it has happened.

I was inside out of myself and something was given a life-mission to say to me hungrily over and over and over your moves are exactly right for a few things in this world: we know you when you come Green Eyes, Green Eyes.

Sliding is living antifriction. Or, no, sliding is living by antifriction. It is finding a modest thing you can do, and then greasing that thing. On both sides. It is grooving with comfort.

That's all anybody has got. It depends on how strong your fantasy is, and whether you really — really — in your own mind, fit into your own fantasy, whether you measure up to what you've fantasized. I don't know what yours is, but I'll bet you don't come up to it.

With the stone question In the heads of Greek statues Who ask where their arms And legs and the tips of their noses Have gone.

Nobody worth a damn could ever come from such a place. It was nothing, like most places and people are nothing.

My move my throat my wildest loves, the eyes behind my eyes. Instead I left Him, though he followed me right to the end.

The river and everything I remembered about it became a possession to me, a personal, private possession, as nothing else in my life ever had. Now it ran nowhere but in my head, but there it ran as though immortally. I could feel it -- I can feel it -- on different places on my body.... In me it still is, and will be until I die, green, rocky, deep, fast, slow, and beautiful beyond reality.

I opened my eyes and saw the dark in all its original color.

If I were going to tell one of my sons how to possess the world, I would simply bring him into my house, show him that solid wall of books, and say to him: 'the secret is in there somewhere, and even if you never find out what it is, you will still have come closer.

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

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

Yet technique matters, even so. God uses it, for a buffalo is not a leopard.

I want you all to stand; will you do that for me, please?

She was the Judy Garland of American poetry.

I want you to hear a new version of Dueling Banjos. Anyone else is welcome.

To say that its wrong to feel this way is not the point; you do feel it. All you see is a flash of fire and, depending on your altitude, you don't even see that sometimes.