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James Dickey Quotes

1923–1997 United States

James Lafayette Dickey (2 February 1923 – 19 January 1997) was a popular American poet and novelist. He was appointed the eighteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1966.

United States
Novelists
Poets

Random James Dickey quote

13 quotes

Drunk on the wind in my mouth,
Wringing the handlebar for speed,
Wild to be wreckage forever.

The Whole Motion; Collected Poems, 1945-1992 (1992)

I saw for a blazing moment
The great grassy world from both sides,
Man and beast in the round of their need.

The Whole Motion; Collected Poems, 1945-1992 (1992)

These hunt, as they have done
But with claws and teeth grown perfect,
More deadly than they can believe.

The Whole Motion; Collected Poems, 1945-1992 (1992)

Nobody worth a damn could ever come from such a place. It was nothing, like most places and people are nothing.

Deliverance (1970)

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.

The Whole Motion; Collected Poems, 1945-1992 (1992)

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.

The Whole Motion; Collected Poems, 1945-1992 (1992)

I was standing in the most absolute aloneness that I had ever been given.

Deliverance (1970)

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.

The Whole Motion; Collected Poems, 1945-1992 (1992)

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.

The Whole Motion; Collected Poems, 1945-1992 (1992)

I have just come down from my father.
Higher and higher he lies
Above me in a blue light
Shed by a tinted window.

The Whole Motion; Collected Poems, 1945-1992 (1992)

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.

The Whole Motion; Collected Poems, 1945-1992 (1992)

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.

The Whole Motion; Collected Poems, 1945-1992 (1992)

Something or other was being made good. I touched the knife hilt at my side, and remembered that all men were once boys, and that boys are always looking for ways to become men. Some of the ways are easy, too; all you have to do is be satisfied that it has happened.

Deliverance (1970)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: James Dickey (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.