Al Purdy Quotations

In my own mind, I was sort of a desperate kid.

I'm not religious in any formal sense, not in any God sense.

I was desperately unhappy trying to adjust to the world.

I started writing when I was about thirteen.

Uneasily the leaves fall at this season, forgetting what to do or where to go; the red amnesiacs of autumn drifting thru the graveyard forest. What they have forgotten they have forgotten: what they meant to do instead of fall is not in earth or time recoverable the fossils of intention, the shapes of rot.

I don't think I do have a soul.

At a certain age you're always uncertain how other people will take you.

And it occurs to me that if I were aboard a rowboat floating in the middle of all the beer I've drunk in a lifetime, I'd never be able to see the shore.

A collected poems' is either a gravestone or a testimonial to survival.

For me, the vast marvel is to be alive. For man, or for flowers or beast or bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly and perfectly alive.