Dan Chiasson > Quotes

“If you are made for flight, intended for it,
you had better find a pursuer, fast.
Otherwise, all that fleeing is going nowhere.”
― Dan Chiasson

“Worn out by suffering, we lie on our great backs,
tossing grass up to heaven—as a distraction, not a prayer.

That’s not humility you see on our long final journeys
it’s procrastination. It hurts my heavy body to lie down.

— Dan Chiasson, from “The Elephant,” Natural History. (Knopf; First edition. edition October 11, 2005)”
― Dan Chiasson

“The most significant events, Bishop seems to argue, are destined to remain outside the scope of description. It is perhaps their very status as excessive or fugitive that makes them, in the end, significant. A poet who believes such things will not arrive uncomplicatedly at self-description.”
― Dan Chiasson, One Kind of Everything: Poem and Person in Contemporary America

“If you can orbit the planet, why can't you see
what makes the human heart happy?
Is it art or is it sex?
Or is it, as I suspect, just keeping going

from next thing to next thing
to next thing to next thing
to next to next to next to next
pulsating stupidly to outlast time?”
― Dan Chiasson, Where's the Moon, There's the Moon: Poems

“There are varieties of life unknown to you.
Their whole identity is: you can't find out.”
― Dan Chiasson, Where's the Moon, There's the Moon: Poems