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Marilyn Hacker

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

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

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Donna Grant

"All our words from loose using have lost their edge."

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"Language is the friendliest of the things from which we cannot escape."

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Donna Grant

"'Mean to' don't pick no cotton."

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Donna Grant

"If Bengali is my mother, then English is my father and friend."

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"The Eskimo has fifty-names for snow because it is important to them there ought to be as many for love."

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Donna Grant

"Putting it into words will destroy any meaning."

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Donna Grant

"Why people use "Was" I have heard some people to say "I was a smart kid at school - Eminem", but why "Was", was is a word for describing the past... which will mean that has started and ended... so what??? How to get it now? You aren't wise, are you?"

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Donna Grant

"He is forced to coin words himself, and, taking his pain in one hand, and a lump of pure sound in the other (as perhaps the people of Babel did in the beginning), so to crush them together that a brand new word in the end drops out."

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Donna Grant

"Words are the fallen ruins of silent majesty."

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Donna Grant

"Kitai blinked slowly. "Why would you use the same word for these things? That is ridiculous.""We have a lot of words like that," Tavi said. "They can mean more than one thing.""That is stupid," Kitai said. "It is difficult enough to communicate without making it more complicated with words that mean more than one thing."

Explore more quotes by Marilyn Hacker

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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."
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Marilyn Hacker
"Translation makes me look at how a poem is put together in a different way, without the personal investment of the poem I'm writing myself, but equally closely technically."
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Marilyn Hacker
"Paris is a wonderful city. I can't say I belong to an especially anglophone community."
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Marilyn Hacker
"The pull between sound and syntax creates a kind of musical tension in the language that interests me."
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Marilyn Hacker
"There is something very satisfactory about being in the middle of something."
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Marilyn Hacker
"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."
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Marilyn Hacker
"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."
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Marilyn Hacker
"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."
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Marilyn Hacker
"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."
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Marilyn Hacker
"I worked at all kinds of jobs, mostly commercial editing."
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