James Dickey Quotes

With the plane nowhere and her body taking by the throat
The undying cry of the void falling living beginning to be something
That no one has ever been and lived through screaming without enough air.

I had the feeling that if it were perfectly quiet, if I could hear nothing, I would never wake up. Something in the world had to pull me back, for every night I went down deep, and if I had any sensation during sleep, it was of going deeper and deeper, trying to reach a point, a line or border.

Those that are hunted
Know this as their life,
Their reward: to walk
Under such trees in full knowledge
Of what is in glory above them,
And to feel no fear.

I decided that survival was not in the rivets and the metal, and not in the double-sealed doors and not in the marbles of Chinese checkers. It was in me. It came down to the man, and what he could do. The body is the one thing you can't fake; it's just got to be there.

It was something like love
From another world that seized her
From behind, and she gave, not lifting her head
Out of dew, without ever looking, her best
Self to that great need.

Nobody worth a damn could ever come from such a place. It was nothing, like most places and people are nothing.

I have just come down from my father.
Higher and higher he lies
Above me in a blue light
Shed by a tinted window.

Something or other was being made good. I touched the knife hilt at my side, and remembered that all men were once boys, and that boys are always looking for ways to become men. Some of the ways are easy, too; all you have to do is be satisfied that it has happened.

That’s all anybody has got. It depends on how strong your fantasy is, and whether you really — really — in your own mind, fit into your own fantasy, whether you measure up to what you’ve fantasized. I don’t know what yours is, but I’ll bet you don’t come up to it.

These hunt, as they have done
But with claws and teeth grown perfect,
More deadly than they can believe.

I was standing in the most absolute aloneness that I had ever been given.

I saw for a blazing moment
The great grassy world from both sides,
Man and beast in the round of their need.

Dust fanned in scraped puffs from the earth
Between his arms, and blood turned his face inside out,
To demonstrate its suppleness
Of veins, as he perfected his role.

The river and everything I remembered about it became a possession to me, a personal, private possession, as nothing else in my life ever had. Now it ran nowhere but in my head, but there it ran as though immortally. I could feel it -- I can feel it -- on different places on my body.... In me it still is, and will be until I die, green, rocky, deep, fast, slow, and beautiful beyond reality.

There was nothing in common, in the way he was lying, with any of the positions I had seen him in while he was alive, until I remembered the pose by the river in which I had most wanted to kill him. He now had that same relaxed, enjoying look of belonging anywhere he happened to be, and particularly in the woods.