Alice Notley Quotes

#1. I knew you were in charge of me but my mind broke on its own.

Alice Notley

#2. ... our production of the world, our interpretation of it, what we've been told to experience and what we've been told we have to do, both worry and distress me. I don't want to live in someone else's dream.

Alice Notley

#3. It's all like me; and any song for this would just be bullshit. This is a thing, where they stopped trying, they deserted it, and desertion itself is the only possible song.

Alice Notley

#4. You're dancing on me
said the cosmic dragon, the galactic surface of all we can see.
So fucking what? she said.

Alice Notley

#5. you see all night in your dreams. And the blue of my voice can't help but see you.

Alice Notley

#6. Because we rejected a certain kind of critical language people just assumed that we were dumb

Alice Notley

#7. We name us and then we are lost, tamed
I choose words, more words, to cure the tameness, not the wildness

Alice Notley

#8. Jack of diamonds is a hard card, why should there be a story? It's too hard a card to please, and it isn't the no earth I know. I got hepatitis C from shooting speed thirty-three years ago.

Alice Notley

#9. Writing poetry is what I am. I wouldn't know what else to be.

Alice Notley

#10. I do utterly despise dailiness as it stands. I can't abide what the world has become, the frozen-ness of our product this evil thing that we kiss the ass of every hour. I want a dailiness that is free and beautiful

Alice Notley

#11. I didn't care much what happened to me, so chance didn't matter.

Alice Notley

#12. Abolish these categories of pain
(or is it love)
Let it all be one pain
Pain swallows itself, dies like a star.

Alice Notley

#13. In love there is no because.

Alice Notley

#14. oh each poet's a beautiful human girl who must die.

Alice Notley

#15. And maybe you can't know me now.
Maybe I'm just blood. Whatever that's for.

Alice Notley

#16. I'll never know how to live, will you?

Alice Notley

#17. Gee whiz, it's all fucking heart-
breaking

Alice Notley

#18. Feeling awful is physiological you say.
God I hate you, I say. Yes you can find the neurons for feeling awful. Do you think you can find the neurons for the fact I hate you?

Alice Notley

#19. Who do you serve? Do you serve somebody?
I serve the poem, no one.

Alice Notley

#20. It's necessary to maintain a state of disobedience against ... everything.

Alice Notley