James Dickey Quotes

“... 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”

“... 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”

“Respectability is the dickey on the bosom of civilization.”

“I loved to make a great defensive play, I'd rather do that than hit a home run.”

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

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

“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.”

“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. There's a part of me that has never heard of a telephone.”

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

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

“I heard you on the phone with her. I happened to be in your arms, and you happened to be inside of me, balls deep from what I remember, so I felt the difference, felt what you felt for her, heard how your voice changed when you talked to her.”