top of page
"There is something very satisfactory about being in the middle of something."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Being quotes

"You can wipe out your opponents. But if you do it unjustly you become eligible for being wiped out yourself."

"There is more pleasure in loving than in being beloved."

"No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to elbow himself through the world, giving and receiving offence."

"Where every something, being blent together turns to a wild of nothing."

"Quit aspiring and dreaming and start being."

"Being a hero is about the shortest-lived profession on earth."
Explore more quotes by Marilyn Hacker

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

"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."

"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."

"I try to write everyday. I do that much better over here than when I'm teaching. I always rewrite, usually fairly close-on which is to say first draft, then put it aside for 24 hours then more drafts."

"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."

"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."

"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."
bottom of page