Quotes from Al Purdy

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.

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

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

I don't mind a bit being labelled a suicide.

I hold my madness like a sword and plunge it in your body all night long;

the loss of love that comes to mean more than the love itself and how explain that? — a still pool in the forest that has ceased to reflect anything except the past from "Listening to Myself

so much like riding dangerous women with whiskey coloured eyes - such women as once fell dead with their lovers with fire in their heads and slippery froth on thighs

And you you bitch no irritating questions re love and permanence only an unrolling lifetime here between your rocking thighs and the semblance of motion

Seeing the sky darken & the fields turn brown & the lake lead-grey as some enormous scrap of sheet metal & wind grabs the world around the equator I am most thankful then for knowing about the little gold hairs on your belly

My dove my little one tonight there will be wine and drunken suitors from the logging camps to pin you down in the outlying lands of sleep where all roads lead back to the home-village and water may be walked on)

I forget whether I ever loved you in the past—when you enter the room your climate is the mood of living, the hinge of now, in time the present tense. Certainly you are the world I am not done with, until I dispense with words— Yet neutral: something I say will flash back like light or shadow; you wait to be a stranger I've not met or fondled or slept with. from "Where the Moment Is

Genius is children it lives in far Centaurus and star clusters beyond cold Orion and sometimes visits earth when there is no one home

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

Things were so bad we ate rabbits that neighbours had run over and gave to us because they knew we were broke.

I started writing when I was about thirteen.

You've never seen this country It's not the way you thought it was Look again.

I was desperately unhappy trying to adjust to the world.

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