Quotes from Stephen Dunn

so many people walk up to me and tell me they're dead, though they're just describing their afternoons.

A man's mistakes (if I may lecture you), his worst acts, aren't out of character, as he'd like to think, are not put on him by power or stress or too much to drink, but simply a worse self he consents to be.

Why not just try to settle in, take your place, however undeserved, among the fortunate? Why not trust that almost everyone, even in his own house, is a troubled guest?

The good poem allows us to believe we have a soul. In the presence of a good poem we remember/discover the soul has an appetite, and that appetite is for emotional veracity and for the unsayable. The general condition of the soul, therefore, is stoic hunger, stoic loneliness. Paul Eluard wrote, "There is another world, and it is in this one." The not so good poem isn't able to startle us into consideration of that world. The soul is never pricked into wakefulness.

The good poem simultaneously reveals and conceals. It is in this sense that it is mysterious. The not so good poem is often mysterious only by virtue of its concealment. Or it wears exotic clothing to hide its essential plainness.

There will always be people who think suffering leads to enlightenment, who place themselves on the verge of what's about to break, or go dangerously wrong. Let's resist them and their thinking, you and I. Let's not rush toward that sure thing that awaits us, which can dumb us into nonsense and pain.

historical. Outside, waiting to be seated: Illness, Boredom, Sorrow. Loneliness already seated, dining with a group.

I like the word "only" in the last sentence: "…you are only a troubled guest / on the dark earth." The "only" suggests that to be a troubled guest is a normal condition, and that you might have many other identities at the same time. But to be only a troubled guest is of course a particularly sad identity.

And the words we find are always insufficient, like love, though they are often lovely and all we have.

Better to be furious at one thing, become radiant with purpose. Better to love links and rhythms than all-embracing answers.

Better to be furious at one thing, become radiant with purpose. Better to love links and rhythms than all-embracing answers.

What feeling feels like over time. An attempt to screw up what feeling feels like over time. Heartbreak and a high C.... The often welcome melodic lie.... The soul's undersong. The orchestration of randomness, a flirtation with the boundaries of silence and space.... a reminder that the self wants to disappear, be taken away from itself and returned.

I've tried to become someone else for a while, only to discover that he, too, was me.

Altruism is for those who can't endure their desires. There's a world as ambiguous as a moan, a pleasure moan our earnest neighbors might think a crime. It's where we could live. I'll say I love you, Which will lead, of course, to disappointment, but those words unsaid poison every next moment. I will try to disappoint you better than anyone else has. --Mon Semblable

I'll say I love you, Which will lead, of course, to disappointment, but those words unsaid poison every next moment. I will try to disappoint you better than anyone else has.

I've had it with all stingy-hearted sons of bitches. A heart is to be spent.

I love what's left after love has been tested.

Connubial Because with alarming accuracy she'd been identifying patterns I was unaware of—this tic, that tendency, like the way I've mastered the language of intimacy in order to conceal how I felt— I knew I was in danger of being terribly understood.

I'll always deny that I kissed her. I was just whispering into her mouth.

When I stop becoming, that's when I worry.

Now and again I feel the astonishment of being alive like this, in this body.

Although I know it's unfair, I reveal myself one mask at a time.

I make myself up from everything I am, or could be. For many years I was more desire than fact. When I stop becoming, that's when I worry.

May you turn stone, my daughter, into silk. May you make men better than they are.