Quotes by James Dickey

“A poet is someone who stands outside in the rain hoping to be struck by lightning.”

... Up telephone poles, Which rear, half out of leavageAs though they would shriekLike things smothered by their ownGreen, mindless, unkillable ghosts.In Georgia, the legend saysThat you must close your windowsAt night to keep it out of the houseThe glass is tinged with green, even so,As the tendrils crawl over the fields.The night the Kudzu hasYour pasture, you sleep like the dead.Silence has grown orientalAnd you cannot step upon the ground...ALL: Kudzu by James Dickey

The women of the South have brought into American literature a unique mixture of domesticity and grotesquerie.

Detachment produces a peculiar state of mind. Maybe thats the worst sentence of all, to be deprived of feeling what a human being ought to be entitled to feel.

In his mind he was always leaving, always going somewhere, always doing something else.

I go out on the side of a hill, maybe hunting deer, and sit there and see the shadow of night coming over the hill, and I can swear to you there is a part of me that is absolutely untouched by anything civilized. Theres a part of me that has never heard of a telephone.

I feel very happy to see the sun come up every day. I feel happy to be around. ... I like to take this day- any day-and go to town with it.

Flight is the only true sensation that men have achieved in modern history.

I want a fever, in poetry: a fever, and tranquillity.