Kim Addonizio Quotes

#1. Robert Frost said, No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.

Kim Addonizio

#2. I want to walk like I'm the only woman on earth and I can have my pick.

Kim Addonizio

#3. 131/ Writing a novel is like having a baby. I know because I've had both, and the experiences were hellish. By comparison, the torture of the damned - plunged into excrement, boiled in blood, beheaded, set upon by harpies - are like love nips from your yippy little dog.

Kim Addonizio

#4. If your workshop praises a poem, don't think everyone is too nice to tell you how terrible it really is. (If it is that kind of workshop, you should get out of it as soon as possible - honest feedback is the sign that people respect your writing and take it seriously.)

Kim Addonizio

#5. Maybe you're one of those people who writes poems, but rarely reads them. Let me put this as delicately as I can: If you don't read, your writing is going to suck.

Kim Addonizio

#6. 82/ The truth is that writing is simply not reliable. You can't count on it to be there just because you've made time for it. In fact, making space might make it disappear.

Kim Addonizio

#7. This is your genius: your own profound desire to write. Your love of words and language, your attempt to get to what poet Donald Hall called "the unsayable said." If

Kim Addonizio

#8. Love's merciless, the way it travels in and keeps emitting light.

Kim Addonizio

#9. Imagine a sentence as a hall with a series of doors. Each door is a possible way to use what you've already written to generate new material.

Kim Addonizio

#10. Today I found a twenty in the red-lined pocket of my wool coat. There's no twenty-dollar bill in the red lining of my uterus.

Kim Addonizio

#11. I want a red dress.
I want it flimsy and cheap,
I want it too tight, I want to wear it
until someone tears it off me.
I want it sleeveless and backless,
this dress, so no one has to guess
what's underneath.

Kim Addonizio

#12. 66/ 'Two roads diverge in a yellow wood,' I think. It didn't ultimately matter which one you took; that was the real point of Frost's poem. The roads were pretty much the same. That stuff about the one less traveled making all the difference was bullshit.

Kim Addonizio

#13. Love me like a wrong turn on a bad road
late at night.

Kim Addonizio

#14. I only want to walk a little longer in the cold blessing of the rain, and lift my face to it.

Kim Addonizio

#15. 59/ I walk into Summerville and no matter what my mood is it instantly drops about thirty degrees.

Kim Addonizio

#16. I'm so in love with you I can't stand up.

Kim Addonizio

#17. All artists' work is autobiographical. Any writer's work is a map of their psyche. You can really see what their concerns are, what their obsessions are, and what interests them.

Kim Addonizio