Al Purdy quotes:

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.

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 don't think I do have a soul.

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

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

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

I was desperately unhappy trying to adjust to the world.

And it occurs to me that if I were aboard a rowboat floating in the middle of all the beer I've drunk in a lifetime, I'd never be able to see the shore.

Uneasily the leaves fall at this season, forgetting what to do or where to go; the red amnesiacs of autumn drifting thru the graveyard forest. What they have forgotten they have forgotten: what they meant to do instead of fall is not in earth or time recoverable the fossils of intention, the shapes of rot.

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

I started writing when I was about thirteen.