top of page
"I lived in the studio apartment that I bought for four years before I bought it in 1989, so I was already in it. I began living there in 1985, so I've had the same address and phone number since then."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Living quotes

"The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases."

"Don't look for meaning in life. It was meant to be lived not understood."

"Life is neither a glorious highlight reel nor a monstrous tragedy. Every day is a good day to live and a good day to die. Every day is also an apt time to learn and express joy and love for the entire natural world. Each day is an apt time to make contact with other people and express empathy for the entire world. Each day is perfect to accept with indifference all aspects of being."

"When all this started, I asked myself, 'Am I going to withdraw from the world, like most people do, or am I going to live?'I decided I'm going to live---or at least try to live---the way I want, with dignity, with courage, with humor, with composure."

"I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing."

"All living souls welcome whatever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible."

"Living well is an art that can be developed: a love of life and ability to take great pleasure from small offerings and assurance that the world owes you nothing and that every gift is exactly that, a gift."
Explore more quotes by Marilyn Hacker

"My mother was told she couldn't go to medical school because she was a woman and a Jew. So she became a teacher in the New York City public school system."

"The ambiguities of language, both in terms of vocabulary and syntax, are fascinating: how important connotation is, what is lost and what is gained in the linguistic transition."

"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."

"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."

"You are almost not free, if you are teaching a group of graduate students, to become friends with one of them. I don't mean anything erotically charged, just a friendship."

"I've been an inveterate reader of literary magazines since I was a teenager. There are always discoveries. You're sitting in your easy chair, reading; you realize you've read a story or a group of poems four times, and you know, Yes, I want to go farther with this writer."

"The woman poet must be either a sexless, reclusive eccentric, with nothing to say specifically to women, or a brilliant, tragic, tortured suicide."

"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."
bottom of page