top of page
"I'm addicted to email, but other than that, there are practical things - being able to buy a book on the internet that you can't find in your local bookshop. This could be a lifeline if you live further from the sources."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Being quotes

"There are advantages to being a star though - you can always get a table in a full restaurant."

"Don't bother about being modern. Unfortunately it is the one thing that, whatever you do, you cannot avoid."

"So what is discord at one level of your being is harmony at another level."

"I go straight from thinking about my narrator to being him."

"Being a press secretary is like learning to type: You're hunting and pecking for a while and then you find yourself doing the touch system and don't realize it. You're speaking for the president without ever having to go to him."

"Not being able to touch is sometimes as interesting as being able to touch."

"I'm so gullible. I'm so damn gullible. And I am so sick of me being gullible."
Explore more quotes by Marilyn Hacker

"I have experienced healing through other writers' poetry, but there's no way I can sit down to write in the hope a poem will have healing potential. If I do, I'll write a bad poem."

"Perhaps first and foremost is the challenge of taking what I find as a reader and making it into a poem that, primarily, has to be a plausible poem in English."

"Clearly, once the student is no longer a student the possibilities of relationship are enlarged."

"The pull between sound and syntax creates a kind of musical tension in the language that interests me."

"I wonder what it means about American literary culture and its transmission when I consider the number of American poets who earn their living teaching creative writing in universities. I've ended up doing that myself."

"We sometimes received - and I would read - 200 manuscripts a week. Some of them were wonderful, some were terrible; most were mediocre. It was like the gifts of the good and bad fairies."

"Of the individual poems, some are more lyric and some are more descriptive or narrative. Each poem is fixed in a moment. All those moments written or read together take on the movement and architecture of a narrative."

"Poetry seems to have been eliminated as a literary genre, and installed instead, as a kind of spiritual aerobic exercise - nobody need read it, but anybody can do it."

"I don't know whether a poem has be there to help to develop something. I think it's there for itself, for what the reader finds in it."
bottom of page