Star Dust Quotes

“drugged to sleep by repetition of the diurnal
round, the monotonous sorrow of the finite,

within       I am awake

repairing in dirt the frayed immaculate thread
forced by being to watch the birth of suns”
― Frank Bidart, Star Dust

“Understand that when the beast within you

succeeds again in paralyzing into unending

incompletion whatever you again had the temerity to
try to make

its triumph is made sweeter by confirmation of its

rectitude. It knows that it alone
knows you.”
― Frank Bidart, Star Dust

“Song


You know that it is there, lair
where the bear ceases
for a time even to exist.

Crawl in. You have at last killed
enough and eaten enough to be fat
enough to cease for a time to exist.

Crawl in. It takes talent to live at night, and scorning
others you had that talent, but now you sniff
the season when you must cease to exist.

Crawl in. Whatever for good or ill
grows within you needs
you for a time to cease to exist.

It is not raining inside
tonight. You know that it is there. Crawl in.”
― Frank Bidart, Star Dust

“Making is the mirror in which we see ourselves.”
― Frank Bidart, Star Dust

“After sex & metaphysics,—
… what?

What you have made.”
― Frank Bidart, Star Dust

“Horrible the fate of the advice-giver in our culture: to repeat oneself in a thousand contexts until death, or irrelevance.

            *

I abjure advice-giver.”
― Frank Bidart, Star Dust

“To be a child is to see things and not
know them; then you know them.”
― Frank Bidart, Star Dust

“Obdurate, you say: We
are darkness. We are the city

whose brightness blots the stars from night”
― Frank Bidart, Star Dust

“What once was apprehended in passion
survives as opinion.”
― Frank Bidart, Star Dust

“In the United States at the end of the twentieth century, the greatest luxury is to live a life in which the work that one does to earn a living, and what one has the appetite to make, coincide--by a kind of grace are the same, one.”
― Frank Bidart, Star Dust