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"Belladonna, n.: In Italian a beautiful lady; in English a deadly poison. A striking example of the essential identity of the two tongues."
Author Name
Personal Development

"Cussing like a commoner wasn't something I was tested on. I picked that habit up outside of high school."
Author Name
Personal Development

"A word is not filling in the gaps, but the fertilization of silence."
Author Name
Personal Development

"It is very useful, when one is young, to learn the difference between "literally" and "figuratively." If something happens literally, it actually happens; if something happens figuratively, it feels like it is happening. If you are literally jumping for joy, for instance, it means you are leaping in the air because you are very happy. If you are figuratively jumping for joy, it means you are so happy that you could jump for joy, but are saving your energy for other matters."
Author Name
Personal Development

"No man fully capable of his own language ever masters another."
Author Name
Personal Development

"Putting it into words will destroy any meaning."
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Personal Development

"Her majesty is one verb short of a sentence."
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Personal Development

"Words are not static.Language shape our memories, and it is also shaped by our memories."
Author Name
Personal Development

"Know that diamonds and roses are as uncomfortable when they tumble from one's lips as toads and frogs: colder, too, and sharper, and they cut."
Author Name
Personal Development

"Certainly ordinary language has no claim to be the last word, if there is such a thing."
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Personal Development
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"The pleasure that I take in writing gets me interested in writing a poem. It's not a statement about what I think anybody else should be doing. For me, it's an interesting tension between interior and exterior."
Pleasure

"Community means people spending time together here, and I don't think there's really that."
Time

"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."
Poetry

"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."
Friendship

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

"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."
Literature

"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."
Living

"I worked at all kinds of jobs, mostly commercial editing."
Employment

"Everyone thinks they're going to write one book of poems or one novel."
Poems

"There is a way in which all writing is connected. In a second language, for example, a workshop can liberate the students' use of the vocabulary they're acquiring."
Education
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