Dorianne Laux Quotes

22 quotes in 594 categories

• You are not your poetry. Your self-esteem shouldn't depend on whether you publish, or whether some editor or writer you admire thinks you're any good.
• A poem is like a child; at some point we have to let it go and trust that it will make its own way in…
• We all get habituated, right? You get up in the morning, have your coffee, and read your newspaper, and that’s great. Everybody loves life in…
• I don’t worry anymore about writing. There are times that I go through dry periods. I never go through a block. I’m always writing, but…
• I love people and psychology. As a writer, I’m not so interested in Fred getting from the living room to the car. I want to…
• You’ve traveled this far on the back of every mistake
• Tinted Distances is a tender meditation that reveals a careful eye and steady devotion to elegy and ode.
• Someone spoke to me last night,/ told me the truth. Just a few words,. but I recognized it./ I knew I should make myself get…
• Good writing works from a simple premise: your experience is not yours alone, but in some sense a metaphor for everyone's.
• Poetry is an intimate act. It's about bringing forth something that's inside you--whether it is a memory, a philosophical idea, a deep love for another…
• Every good poem asks a question, and every good poet asks every question.
• We aren't suggesting that mental instability or unhappiness makes one a better poet, or a poet at all; and contrary to the romantic notion of…
• Writing and reading are the only ways to find your voice. It won't magically burst forth in your poems the next time you sit down…
• Who you are contributes to your poetry in a number of important ways, but you shouldn't identify with your poems so closely that when they…
• That's how it is sometimes--God comes to your window, all bright light and black wings, and you're just too tired to open it.
• How not to imagine the tumors ripening beneath his skin, flesh I have kissed, stroked with my fingertips, pressed my belly and breasts against, some…
• Every poem I write falls short in some important way. But I go on trying to write the one that won’t.
• And I saw it didn't matter who had loved me or who I loved. I was alone. The black oily asphalt, the slick beauty of…
• Maybe it's what we don't say/that saves us.
• Moon In the Window I wish I could say I was the kind of child who watched the moon from her window, would turn toward…

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