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.
When intelligent people pride themselves on not understanding, it is quite natural they should succeed better than fools.
On an important decision one rarely has 100% of the information needed for a good decision no matter how much one spends or how long one waits. And, if one waits too long, he has a different problem and has to start all over. This is the terrible dilemma of the hesitant decision maker.
Even if I could, I wouldn't. Scars can come in handy. I have one myself above my left knee that is a perfect map of the London Underground.
The master was an old Turtle--we used to call him Tortoise--' Why did you call him Tortoise, if he wasn't one?' Alice asked. We called him Tortoise because he taught us,' said the Mock Turtle angrily; 'really you are very dull!' You ought to be ashamed of yourself for asking such a simple question,' added the Gryphon; and then they both sat silent and looked at poor Alice, who felt ready to sink into the earth.
An active mind cannot exist in an inactive body.
A man is the whole encyclopedia of facts.
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