Dana Gioia Quotations

Art is an irreplaceable way of understanding and expressing the world,

Everyone enjoys stories of double lives and secret identities. Children have Superman; intellectuals have Wallace Stevens.

What we conceal Is always more than what we dare confide. Think of the letters that we write our dead.

We lived in places that we never knew. We could not name the birds perched on our sill, Or see the trees we cut down for our view. What we possessed we always chose to kill. "We claimed the earth but did not hear her claim, And when we died, they laid us on her breast, But she refuses us until we earn Forgiveness from the lives we dispossessed.

My blessed California, you are so wise. You render death abstract, efficient, clean. Your afterlife is only real estate, And in his kingdom Death must stay unseen.

We are not as we were. Death has been our pentecost.

The music that of common speech but slanted so that each detail sounds unexpected as a sharp inserted in a simple scale.

How many voices have escaped you until now, the venting furnace, the floorboards underfoot, the steady accusations of the clock numbering the minutes no one will mark. The terrible clarity this moment brings, the useless insight, the unbroken dark.

We offer you the landscape of your birth -- Exquisite and despoiled. We all share blame. We cannot ask forgiveness of the earth For killing what we cannot even name.

Teach us the names of what we have destroyed.