Quotes from Dana Gioia

Poetry offers a way of understanding and expressing existence that is fundamentally different from conceptual thought.

Poetry speaks most effectively and inclusively (whether in free or formal verse) when it recognizes its connection - without apology - to its musical and ritualistic origins.

There are some truths about life that can be expressed only as stories, or songs, or images. Art delights, instructs, consoles. It educates our emotions.

To speak from a particular place and time is not provincialism but part of a writer's identity.

The new year always brings us what we want Simply by bringing us along—to see A calendar with every day uncrossed, A field of snow without a single footprint.

Art is an irreplaceable way of understanding and expressing the world.

And memory insists on pining For places it never went, As if life would be happier Just by being different.

The daylight needs no praise, and so we praise it always- greater than ourselves and all the airy words we summon.

What if we had walked a different path one day, would some small incident have nudged us elsewhere the way a pebble tossed into a brook might change the course a hundred miles downstream?

Unsaid So much of what we live goes on inside- The diaries of grief, the tounge-tied aches Of unacknowledged love are no less real. For having passed unsaid What we conceal Is always more than we dare confide. Think of the letters we write our dead.

This last mute touch that lingers is farewell.

O Suburbs of Despair where nothing but the weather ever changes!

Dali dreamed of Hitler as a white-skinned girl- impossibly pale, luminous and lifeless as the moon.

Breton considered suicide the truest art, though life seemed hardly worth the trouble to discard.

This is the feast of our mortality, the most mundane and human holiday.

I attended Catholic schools at a time when Latin was still a living ritual language.

Why does that evening's memory Return with this night's storm - A party twenty years ago, Its disappointments warm? There are so many MIGHT-HAVE-BEENS WHAT-IFS that won't stay buried Other cities, other jobs Strangers we might have married And memory insists on pining For places it never went, As if life would be happier Just by being different

The world does not need words. It articulates itself in sunlight, leaves, and shadows. The stones on the path are no less real for lying uncatalogued and uncounted. The fluent leaves speak only the dialect of pure being.

I read for pleasure,' wrote Margaret Atwood, 'and that is the moment at which I learn most. Subliminal learning.

Here is the church, Here is the steeple, Open it up, And see all the people.

Whatever the reasons, reading somehow awakens something in a kid's life that makes them take their own life more seriously and other people's lives more seriously.

Hathwell is writing with quiet intensity about significant things.

I am the Angel with the Broken Wing, The one large statue in this quiet room. …Perhaps I am a masterpiece of sorts— The perfect emblem of futility.

I read for pleasure," wrote Margaret Atwood, "and that is the moment at which I learn most. Subliminal learning.