Quotes from Charles Wright

Our dreams are luminous, a cast fire upon the world. Morning arrives and that's it. Sunlight darkens the earth.

I empty myself with light Until I become morning.

The music of memory has its own pitch,/which not everyone hears.

Poetry is the dark side of the moon.

How sweet the past is, no matter how wrong, or how sad. How sweet is yesterday's noise

How many times can summer turn to fall in one life?

Some people have everything Other people don't But everything don't mean a thing If it ain't the thing you want

What makes us leave what we love best? What is it inside us that keeps erasing itself When we need it most, That sends us into uncertainty for its own sake And holds us flush there until we begin to love it And have to begin again? What is it within our own lives we decline to live Whenever we find it, making our days unendurable, And nights almost visionless? I still don't know yet, but I do it.

Our dreams are luminous, a cast fire upon the world. Morning arrives and that's it. Sunlight darkens the earth.

We've all led raucous lives, some of them inside, some of them out. But only the poem you leave behind is what's important. Everyone knows this. The voyage into the interior is all that matters, Whatever your ride. Sometimes I can't sit still for all the asininities I read. Give me the hummingbird, who has to eat sixty times His own weight a day just to stay alive. Now that's a life on the edge.

How many times can summer turn to fall in one life?

It may not be written in any book, but it is written— You can't go back, you can't repeat the unrepeatable.

There is an otherness inside us We never touch, no matter how far down our hands reach. It is the past, with its good looks and Anytime, Anywhere ... Our prayers go out to it, our arms go out to it Year after year, But who can ever remember enough?

Each word, as someone once wrote, contains the universe. The visible carries all the invisible on its back. Tonight, in the unconditional, what moves in the long-limbed grasses, what touches me As though I didn't exist? What is it that keeps on moving, a tiny pillar of smoke Erect on its hind legs, loose in the hollow grasses? A word I don't know yet, a little word, containing infinity, Noiseless and unrepentant, in sift through the dry grass.

The life of this world is wind Windblown we come, and windblown we go away. All that we look on is windfall. All we remember is wind.

A moment that should have lasted forever and forever Long over— it came and went before I knew it existed. I think I know what it means, But every time I start to explain it, I forget the words.

may we not be strangers in the lush province of joy

I want to be bruised by God. I want to be strung up in a strong light and singled out. I want to be stretched, like music wrung from a dropped seed. I want to be entered and picked clean.

The music of memory has its own pitch,/which not everyone hears.

Snub end of a dismal year, deep in the dwarf orchard, The sky with its undercoat of blackwash and point stars, I stand in the dark and answer to My life, this shirt I want to take off, which is on fire . . .

It's good to know certain things: What's departed, in order to know what's left to come; That water's immeasurable and incomprehensible And blows in the air Where all that's fallen and silent becomes invisible; That fire's the light our names are carved in. That shame is a garment of sorrow; That time is the Adversary, and stays sleepless and wants for nothing; That clouds are unequal and words are.

We've all led raucous lives, some of them inside, some of them out. But only the poem you leave behind is what's important. Everyone knows this.

The ache for anything is a thick dust in the heart.

Arrange your unutterable alphabet, my man, / and hold tight. / It's all you've got, a naming of things, and not so beautiful.