Cate Marvin Quotes

#1. New York is one of those places people tend to derive a sense of identity from - as if, were to you to remove them from the City, they'd turn limp and colorless.

Cate Marvin

#2. It's not what you are in Hollywood - it's what people think you are.

Robert Stack

#3. Some people can't stand being alone. I love solitude and silence. But when I come out of it, I'm a regular talking machine. It's all or nothing for me.

Celine Dion

#4. Because I wake up late, my day is often short. I'm much more active in the evenings, during which I alternately read, write, needle-point, smoke, email, and despair over my decision last June to put my television and DVD player out on the street because I wasn't getting enough work done.

Cate Marvin

#5. I place a lot of emphasis on process and revision because I believe that all of my students can become better writers through hard work.

Cate Marvin

#6. I think with my blood.

Cate Marvin

#7. There IS a difference between poetry and prose! Poems should be sonically charged and new to the ear.

Cate Marvin

#8. To think of writing poetry as a "career" is not only ridiculous, it's dangerous. To the imagination. To the way one thinks of art. The reason poetry as a genre is so special is because it cannot be made a commodity.

Cate Marvin

#9. I prefer poems that occupy an imaginative sphere. When I lived in Cincinnati, I was occasionally referred to as an "Ohio Poet;" this made me uneasy, not only because I think of myself as a generally American poet but also because I like to think I write out of the country of my own mind.

Cate Marvin

#10. When fiction writers like my poems I feel like I've hit the jackpot.

Cate Marvin

#11. Some poems take two to three years to finish. Rarely, a poem will arrive whole. It's nice when that happens. However, process has become so grueling for me over the past few years that when one of my students uses the word "inspiration" I practically shriek with laughter.

Cate Marvin

#12. Don't pass up something that's attractive today because you think you will find something way more attractive tomorrow.

Warren Buffett

#13. Marriage is so much like salvation and our relationship with Christ that Paul says you can't understand marriage without looking at the gospel.

Timothy Keller

#14. Nobody's going to force me to do something against my will. What do I owe anybody that I should submit my will to them?

Lauryn Hill

#15. One of the reasons poetry is such an amazing genre to work with is because it constantly reinvents itself and re-negotiates its terms with the reader.

Cate Marvin

#16. When asked what I'd be if I weren't a writer, I'm tempted to respond with one of father's favorite phrases, one I despised while growing up: "I hate 'what-ifs.'"

Cate Marvin

#17. Place is extremely important to my work because I am always pulling landscape imagery into my poems.

Cate Marvin

#18. I consider poetry my vocation, not my "career." My career is as a university professor; that's what pays the bills.

Cate Marvin

#19. Confessional poetry is, to my mind, more slippery than poems that are sloppily autobiographical; I find the confessional mode much more akin to dramatic monologue.

Cate Marvin

#20. Never underestimate the naughtiness factor.

Eowyn Wood

#21. There was, like, a week straight of shooting, where, like, all I did was shoot a machine gun. And I hate to - every - it went against all my Jewish and Canadian instincts, but I enjoyed every second of it.

Seth Rogen

#22. My first trip abroad was to do a TV version of 'Les Miserables' in France with Anthony Perkins. There I was at 12 acting with the guy from 'Psycho.' My parents were teachers, and it was hard for them to relate to that world.

Dexter Fletcher

#23. My day does not truly begin until I've acquired and consumed a 32-ounce Big Gulp of diet coke from 7-Eleven. It's the Big Gulp that's important, not 7-Eleven, where I find the employees rather disagreeable.

Cate Marvin

#24. I encourage my students to be honest in their assessment of both the published work we read and the work of their classmates. I think there's always the occasion for discussing elements of craft, whether the student's poem is terrible or quite wonderful.

Cate Marvin

#25. The cool thing about having a book is that it takes on its own life. Once it's in the world, you can't follow it. You'd have to have a pretty fantastic surveillance system to track its migration.

Cate Marvin

#26. Like imagination, consciousness has no limits.

Debasish Mridha

#27. I love teaching poetry writing. Students come into the class thinking poetry has to be one way, then leave having created pieces that are wholly original, that have - quite literally - never been made before.

Cate Marvin

#28. I find the elitism and blatant provincialism of many (Manhattan-based) New Yorkers unattractive. Just as place can be an identity crutch that helps a person feel individual, place can be a crutch in poetry.

Cate Marvin

#29. [I]t is rather the case that we desire something because we believe it to be good than that we believe a thing to be good because we desire it. It is the thought that starts things off.

Aristotle.

#30. I didn't want to kill them all. I didn't want to kill anybody! I'm not a killer! You didn't want me, you bastards, you wanted Peter, but you made me do it, you tricked me into it!

Orson Scott Card

#31. I have no precise idea of who makes up my readership. I'm surprised when I discover people have read my poems at all.

Cate Marvin

#32. I've just always loved animals. So I've often thought that if I weren't a writer I'd work for some nonprofit organization that does something positive for animals.

Cate Marvin

#33. Different drinks have different metaphorical weight. Wine's heady, gin is poisonous, vodka's cold, and beer is plain boring. In real life, I'm a big fan of boxed white wine, much to the dismay of my more refined friends.

Cate Marvin

#34. I admire the poetic relationship to place as enacted in Wallace Stevens' poems; his poetics strikes me as an argument against the restraints of realism.

Cate Marvin

#35. We lay our words like tenuous plats, build a bridge over its
unsinkable depth: Not a sea of longing,
but the brack of wanting what's physical
to help us forget we are physical.

Cate Marvin

#36. I like it when poems are challenging, when they concern matters important and personal to the author.

Cate Marvin

#37. One cannot have "success" in poetry. If I wanted to be successful, I'd have become a lawyer.

Cate Marvin

#38. I am like a table
that eats its own legs off
because it's fallen
in love with the floor.

Cate Marvin