Interrogations at Noon Quotes

“The daylight needs no praise, and so we praise it always- greater than ourselves and all the airy words we summon.”
― Dana Gioia, Interrogations at Noon: Poems

“What if we had walked a different path one day, would some small incident have nudged us elsewhere the way a pebble tossed into a brook might change the course a hundred miles downstream?”
― Dana Gioia, Interrogations at Noon: Poems

“This last mute touch that lingers is farewell.”
― Dana Gioia, Interrogations at Noon: Poems

“This is the feast of our mortality, the most mundane and human holiday.”
― Dana Gioia, Interrogations at Noon: Poems

“Breton considered suicide the truest art, though life seemed hardly worth the trouble to discard.”
― Dana Gioia, Interrogations at Noon: Poems

“Dali dreamed of Hitler as a white-skinned girl- impossibly pale, luminous and lifeless as the moon.”
― Dana Gioia, Interrogations at Noon: Poems

“Why does that evening's memory
Return with this night's storm -
A party twenty years ago,
Its disappointments warm?

There are so many MIGHT-HAVE-BEENS
WHAT-IFS that won't stay buried
Other cities, other jobs
Strangers we might have married

And memory insists on pining
For places it never went,
As if life would be happier
Just by being different”
― Dana Gioia, Interrogations at Noon: Poems

“The world does not need words. It articulates itself
in sunlight, leaves, and shadows. The stones on the path
are no less real for lying uncatalogued and uncounted.
The fluent leaves speak only the dialect of pure being.”
― Dana Gioia, Interrogations at Noon: Poems

“Whoever you are: step out of doors tonight,
Out of the room that lets you feel secure.
Infinity is open to your sight.
Whoever you are.”
― Dana Gioia, Interrogations at Noon: Poems