Franz Wright Quotations

I am in no way different from anyone else, that my predicament, my sense of aloneness or isolation may be precisely what unites me with everyone.

What I myself experience is indescribable gratitude in the face of God's perpetual and preemptive love, a love which is not contingent upon requital or even belief in His existence.

Poetry endures when it possesses passionate and primally sincere clarity in the service of articulating universal human concerns.

We know there are poets who are chosen: by what or whom, we no more know than what lies beyond our final breath, or what caused a certain action which resulted in the fulfillment or the desecration and collapse of what we most cared for in life.

When I was nine, I started reading Homer. I would get up at four o'clock in the morning, before I had to go to school, in third or fourth grade, and, for several hours, I would read 'The Iliad' or 'The Odyssey.'

When I'm in certain moods, a conversation will start up in my head, and suddenly I'll realize that the language has reached a very high and interesting level, and then lines and stanzas will just kind of appear, full-blown.

Poetry, just because it is poetry, doesn't mean it is some kind of magic spell.

Beckett's 'Stories and Texts for Nothing' is probably my favorite book.

I write and have done so primarily for personal pleasure.

I've always envied people who compose music or paint, because they don't have to be bothered with the sort of crude mess that language normally is, in everyday life and in the way we use it.

Its hard for me to grasp that I might somehow be my fathers equal in any way.

The poetic prose that most interests me is that of Henri Michaux.

There are people who recall my father as a saint and a monster. I'm quite sure I will share the same fate.

For about twenty years, if I managed to write ten or twelve poems in a year; I considered that a pretty successful year, but I wrote 'The Beforelife' within a year.

I used to comfort myself with the idea of a book with serrated, detachable pages, so that you could read the thing the way it came and then shuffle the pages, like a giant deck of cards, and read the book in an entirely different order. It would be a different book, wouldn't it? It would be one of infinite books.

There is only one heart in my body, have mercy on me.

I basked in you; I loved you, helplessly, with a boundless tongue-tied love. And death doesn't prevent me from loving you. Besides, in my opinion you aren't dead. (I know dead people, and you are not dead.)

The long silences need to be loved, perhaps more than the words which arrive to describe them in time.

We are created by being destroyed.

literature will lose, sunlight will win, don't worry.

And the night smells like snow. Walking home for a moment you almost believe you could start again. And an intense love rushes to your heart, and hope. It’s unendurable, unendurable.

Poem in other words may or may not result from inspiration but must (in reader and author alike) produce it--

I wish my father could be around.

I wish you all the aloneness you hunger for.

This is no occupation for an adult who can look other adults in the eye, carry his own weight, and count himself one of them.

Should each individual snowflake be held accountable for the avalanche?

I believe one day the distance between myself and God will / disappear.

EPITAPH Now I'm not the brightest knife in the drawer, but I know a couple things about this life: poverty silence, impermanence discipline and mystery The world is not illusory, we are From crimson thread to toe tag If you are not disturbed there is something seriously wrong with you, I'm sorry And I know who I am I'll be a voice coming from nowhere, inside-- be glad for me.

The humiliation I go through/when I think of my past/can only be described as grace./We are created by being destroyed.