5 Dana Gioia Quotes on Loss

Dana Gioia quotes on loss

6. This is a prayer, inchoate and unfinished, for you, my love, my loss, my lesion, a rosary of words to count out time's illusions, all the minutes, hours, days the calendar compounds as if the past existed somewhere - like an inheritance still waiting to be claimed.

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

10. 'Teach us the names of what we have destroyed.'

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

45. I did not want my son remembered by uncontrolled howls of pain. My wife and I suffered more than I can express, but to make poems merely out of the agony would have been self-pitying and dishonest. My son had been my greatest joy. His birth had left me awe-struck and humble before life. He turned me from a son into a father - and allowed me to understand my own father clearly for the first time. If I mourned him, I also wanted to preserve the joyful mystery of his existence. The sorrow could not be adequately appreciated without also expressing the joy and wonder.