The heart breaks and breaks and lives by breaking it is necessary to go through dark and deeper dark and not to turn
Interpretation
This quote speaks to the inevitability of pain and suffering as part of the human experience.
Stanley Kunitz reflects on the nature of the heart, suggesting that it endures through repeated heartbreaks, which are essential for personal growth and resilience. Emphasizing the importance of facing darkness, he asserts that experiencing deeper struggles ultimately contributes to the richness of life and the strength required to live fully.
In practice
In a motivational speech about overcoming challenges.
When you look back on a lifetime and think of what has been given to the world by your presence, your fugitive presence, inevitably you think of your art, whatever it may be, as the gift you have made to the world in acknowledgment of the gift you have been given, which is the life itself... That work is not an expression of the desire for praise or recognition, or prizes, but the deepest manifestation of your gratitiude for the gift of life.
Some poems present themselves as cliffs that need to be climbed. Others are so defensive that when you approach their enclosure you half expect to be met by a snarling dog at the gate. Still others want to smother you with their sticky charms.
...few young poets [are] testing their poems against the ear. They're writing for the page, and the page, let me tell you, is a cold bed.
Writer's block is a natural affliction. Writers who have never experienced it have something wrong with them. It means there isn't enough friction-that they aren't making enough of an effort to reconcile the contradictions of life. All you get is sweet monotonous flow. Writer's block is nothing to commit suicide over. It simply indicates some imbalance between your experience and your art, and I think that's constructive.
I want to write poems that are natural, luminous, deep, spare. I dream of an art so transparent that you can look through and see the world.
The universe is a continuous web. Touch it at any point and the whole web quivers.
There is some pleasure even in words, when they bring forgetfulness of present miseries.
I think the world would be a lot better off if more people were to define themselves in terms of their own standards and values and not what other people said or thought about them.
A high station in life is earned by the gallantry with which appalling experiences are survived with grace.
All wars are won or lost before they are ever fought.
I shall die here. Every last inch of me shall perish. Except one. An inch. It's small and it's fragile and it's the only thing in the world worth having. we must never lose it, or sell it, or give it away. We must never let them take it from us.
...it is so silly of people to fancy that old age means crookedness and witheredness and feebleness and sticks and spectacles and rheumatism and forgetfulness! It is so silly! Old age has nothing whatever to do with all that. The right old age means strength and beauty and mirth and courage and clear eyes and strong painless limbs.
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