Marie Howe Quotes

#1. When we think we have something to say we are usually wrong. We are fooling ourselves. Trip into discovery. Don't write what you know, discover something new.

Marie Howe

#2. Every poem holds the unspeakable inside it. The unsayable ... The thing that you can't really say because it's too complicated. It's too complex for us. Every poem has that silence deep in the center of it.

Marie Howe

#3. Each of us suffers with envy/for the forgiven.

Marie Howe

#4. Bedeviled, / human, your plight, in waking, is to choose from the words / that even now sleep on your tongue, and to know that tangled / among them and terribly new is the sentence that could change your life.

Marie Howe

#5. If I stopped dyeing my hair everyone would know that my golden hair is actually gray, and my long American youth would be over - and then what?

Marie Howe

#6. Someone hanging clothes on a line between buildings, someone shaking out a rug from an open window might have heard hammering, one or two blocks away and thought little or nothing of it.

Marie Howe

#7. My soul drank enough to know how thirsty it was. This

Marie Howe

#8. Memory is a poet, not an historian.

Marie Howe

#9. Poetry is telling something to someone.

Marie Howe

#10. Without devotion any life becomes a stranger's story ... told for the body to forget what it once loved.

Marie Howe

#11. Poetry holds the knowledge that we are alive and that we know we're going to die,

Marie Howe

#12. I liked Hell,
I liked to go there alone
relieved to lie in the wreckage, ruined, physically undone.
The worst had happened. What else could hurt me then?
I thought it was the worst, thought nothing worse could come.
Then nothing did, and no one.

Marie Howe

#13. I am living. I remember you.

Marie Howe

#14. We tell each other stories to help each other live. That's why I read poetry. I read poetry to stay alive. That's why I went to poetry in the first place, that's why I stay with it, that's why I'll never leave it.

Marie Howe

#15. But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass, say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a cherishing so deep for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I'm speechless: I am living. I remember you.

Marie Howe

#16. I called her name into the fold between night and day.

Marie Howe

#17. A traitor commits his crime but once. The rest/is retribution.

Marie Howe