Quotes from Gregory Orr

That's crudely put, but If we're not supposed to dance, Why all this music?

Beauty is like life itself: a dawn mist the sun burns off. It gives no peace, no rest.

To me, poetry is about survival first of all. Survival of the individual self, survival of the emotional life.

Poetry is the thread that leads us out of the labyrinth of despair and into the light.

I believe in poetry as a way of surviving the emotional chaos, spiritual confusions and traumatic events that come with being alive.

To guide someone through the halls of hell is not the same as love.

Maybe she loved me, maybe not –who knows?Not even the godscan see intoa human heart –it's that dark.

If we're not supposed to dance, Why all this music?

To me, poetry is about survival first of all. Survival of the individual self, survival of the emotional life.

I was born with a knife in one hand and a wound in the other.

Maybe she loved me, maybe not – who knows? Not even the gods can see into a human heart – it's that dark.

Writing often reveals us to ourselves, lets us name what's important to us and what has been silent or silenced inside us.

Where would I be if not for your wild heart? I ask this not from love, but selfishly— how could I live? How could I make my art?

Somehow something has gone wrong with poetry in our culture. We have lost touch with its purpose and value, and in doing so, we have lost contact with essential aspects of our own emotional and spiritual lives.

To learn by heart is to learn By hurt—grief inscribing Its wisdom in the soft tissue. Song you sing, poem you are— Finger moving, precise As a phonograph needle, Along the groove of scar.

Maybe it was always simple: Loss surrounds us. Who would deny it? We ourselves are loss, are lost.

And to live only once– What if that's not enough?

Her eye and my 'I': Her gazing Creates me.

To be alive: not just the carcass / But the spark. That's crudely put, but... If we're not supposed to dance, Why all this music?

when poets go back by way of memory and imagination to past traumas to engage or re-engage them, then those poets are taking control—are shaping and ordering and asserting power over the hurtful events. In lyric poems, they're both telling the story from their point of view and also shaping the experience into an order (the poem) that shows they have power over what (in the past) overpowered them.

The way the word sinks into the deep snow of the page

I want to study The book of the world: Every vanishing page.

If shadows could talk they would tell us everything we know already but in the melodious language of tears in which every third word rhymes. from "Some Notes on Shadows

Love is what I sought. "Hunger," they called it.