Gregory Orr Quotes

I believe in poetry as a way of surviving the emotional chaos, spiritual confusions and traumatic events that come with being alive.

To me, poetry is about survival first of all. Survival of the individual self, survival of the emotional life.

Every breath is a resurrection.

That's crudely put, but If we're not supposed to dance, Why all this music?

When you're a young poet, reading is a search for your lost family.

Beauty is like life itself: a dawn mist the sun burns off. It gives no peace, no rest.

Poetry is the thread that leads us out of the labyrinth of despair and into the light.

When it's right you can't say Who is kissing whom.

To guide someone through the halls of hell is not the same as love.

With "poets dead and gone" as Keats says in "Mermaid Tavern" they are alive and talking to us and us to them.

Maybe she loved me, maybe not –who knows?Not even the godscan see intoa human heart –it’s that dark.