James Dickey quotes

A poet is someone who stands outside in the rain hoping to be struck by lightning. (James Dickey)
Those that are hunted Know this as their life, Their reward: to walk Under such trees in full knowledge Of what is in glory above them, And to feel no fear.
James Dickey
What you have to realize when you write poetry, or if you love poetry, is that poetry is just naturally the greatest god damn thing that ever was in the whole universe.
James Dickey
There ain't nothin' to dyin', really. You just get tired. You kind of drift away.
James Dickey
Detachment produces a peculiar state of mind. Maybe that's the worst sentence of all, to be deprived of feeling what a human being ought to be entitled to feel.
James Dickey
The true feeling of sex is that of a deep intimacy, but above all of a deep complicity.
James Dickey
I want a fever, in poetry: a fever, and tranquillity.
James Dickey
I have just come down from my father. Higher and higher he lies Above me in a blue light Shed by a tinted window.
James Dickey
I saw for a blazing moment The great grassy world from both sides, Man and beast in the round of their need.
James Dickey
Drunk on the wind in my mouth, Wringing the handlebar for speed, Wild to be wreckage forever.
James Dickey
Dust fanned in scraped puffs from the earth Between his arms, and blood turned his face inside out, To demonstrate its suppleness Of veins, as he perfected his role. (James Dickey)
Here they are. The soft eyes open. If they have lived in a wood It is a wood. If they have lived on plains It is grass rolling Under their feet forever.
James Dickey
She is watching her country lose its evoked master shape watching it lose And gain get back its houses and peoples watching it bring up Its local lights single homes lamps on barn roofs.
James Dickey
These hunt, as they have done But with claws and teeth grown perfect, More deadly than they can believe.
James Dickey
With the plane nowhere and her body taking by the throat The undying cry of the void falling living beginning to be something That no one has ever been and lived through screaming without enough air.
James Dickey
It was something like love From another world that seized her From behind, and she gave, not lifting her head Out of dew, without ever looking, her best Self to that great need.
James Dickey
So much destruction in modern war takes place miles and miles away from the source of the destruction, the human being who has caused it.
James Dickey
To be precise and reckless: that is the consummation devoutly to be wished.
James Dickey
I think Ginsberg has done more harm to the craft that I honor and live by than anybody else by reducing it to a kind of mean that enables the most dubious practitioners to claim they are poets because they think, If the kind of thing Ginsberg does is poetry, I can do that.
James Dickey
The New York Quarterly is an amazing, intelligent, crazy, creative, strange, and indispensable magazine.
James Dickey
He can't imagine the result of the mission because he never saw it. (James Dickey)
I want you to hear a new version of Dueling Banjos. Anyone else is welcome.
James Dickey
To have guilt you've got to earn guilt, but sometimes when you earn it, you don't feel the guilt you ought to have. And that's what The Firebombing is about.
James Dickey
William Packard surely must be one of the great editors of our time.
James Dickey
You are bound, my hunch is, to make it just fine.
James Dickey