Quotes About Kizer

#1. Her fingers were gnarled and crooked like the roots of the oldest swamp trees. Not prissy roots of trees that grew in manicured parks and didn't understand the mess of life. These were roots forced to grow around, and down, and through, to survive.

Amber Kizer

#2. Love is the greatest act of faith.

Amber Kizer

#3. History teaches us things about ourselves, but you have to listen for the lessons. You have to be really still to hear the whispers.

Amber Kizer

#4. He said, "You have pigs in this poem; pigs are not poetic." I got up and walked out of that class and never went back.

Carolyn Kizer

#5. Environmental concerns and feminism are locked together. Generally, women have closer connections to the organic nature of our lives.

Carolyn Kizer

#6. What good is a quilt if it's unused? The same as a life unused. They're meant to be wrung out and frayed around the edges. That's the way of things. Always has been. Always will be.

Amber Kizer

#7. Poets are interested primarily in death and commas.

Carolyn Kizer

#8. You cannot meet someone for a moment, or even cast eyes on someone in the street, without changing. That is my subject.

Carolyn Kizer

#9. Death is what makes life possible. It's the balance, Meridian. There always has to be balance.

Amber Kizer

#10. We live in wonder, blaze in a cycle of passion and apprehension.

Carolyn Kizer

#11. If you live long enough, you learn time is an illusion created by men who fear death. The clocks and watches worshipped by those who deny the inevitable. There is power in acknowledging we are not the ones in control.

Amber Kizer

#12. I used to get so many letters from students about the ending of 'Pro Femina.' So I had a stamp made that said 'irony, irony, irony' to put on a postcard and mail it back.

Carolyn Kizer

#13. I happen to believe that there are a lot of good poets around at present, but a poet like Alex Kuo, who possesses a highly developed moral sense and a bitter honesty, is rare at any time and especially in this time. We need him.

Carolyn Kizer

#14. Be the cockroach

Amber Kizer

#15. No matter how brief an encounter you have with anybody, you both change.

Carolyn Kizer

#16. Smoked sausage and a jolly tupping. Ale and folly. Fickle bosoms and bar fights. That is the sum of experiences my souls gathered from their lives. Why do I attract all the unsophisticated fancy men? For once could one love the opera and his mother?
- Lucinda Myer, b. 1702-d. 1808

Amber Kizer

#17. I'm eclipsed by my role in the world

Amber Kizer

#18. I've been enormously fortunate. People say, 'How do you feel about your reputation?' My real belief is that I have exactly the reputation I deserve ... on the whole, I feel comfortable with myself.

Carolyn Kizer

#19. You write for the people in high school who ignored you. We all do.

Carolyn Kizer

#20. It's hard to take sex ed seriously when the teachers haven't even wiggled their stuff in this millennium.

Amber Kizer

#21. I pushed back my chair and leaned against the table, then swung back to Tens. 'And if you're not nicer to me I'll just wiggle my eyebrows or purse my lips or whatever the hell I do to kill everything around me and then you'll be dead. And then we'll see who gets the last laugh.

Amber Kizer

#22. What is so marvelous about living today is that it is possible to extend, like a flower, spreading petals in all directions.

Carolyn Kizer

#23. As I remember, the first real poem I wrote was about the wheat fields between Spokane and Pullman, to the south.

Carolyn Kizer

#24. You're not from around here, are you? Can't be. Why would we name it I-YOU-POO-Y? Really? Say the letters. I-U-P-U-I.

Amber Kizer

#25. Love conquers nothing. Love provides the motivation; the person must do the rest with their own hands, heart, and feet.

Amber Kizer

#26. I discovered it was easier to carry around a pen than a piano.

Carolyn Kizer

#27. Poets are interested mostly in death and commas.

Carolyn Kizer

#28. I was raised to be a girl Michelangelo.

Carolyn Kizer

#29. A poet, to whom no one cruel and imposing listens, / Disdained by senates, whispers to your dust,

Carolyn Kizer

#30. I didn't learn much about writing at Sarah Lawrence, but I learned a lot about the sources of poems - dreams, myth, history - from the really great teachers, Joseph Campbell, Charles Trinkhaus, Bert Loewenberg, and a young Australian anthropologist named Harry Hawthorne.

Carolyn Kizer

#31. I tell people I never got to hear Dylan Thomas read because my husband wouldn't let me, because he thought it would be a sort of bad influence. People say, 'And you didn't go?' They're so surprised because the me they know would have gone. And I say I was very much a 'yes, dear' wife.

Carolyn Kizer

#32. She tended to be impatient with that sort of intellectual who, for all his brilliance, has never been able to arrive at the simple conclusion that to be reasonably happy you have to be reasonably good.

Carolyn Kizer

#33. What is it? Tens, I can see the stick up your arse from here. I'm dying remember? Dying people don't have time for silly moods

Amber Kizer

#34. I wrote poetry off and on in high school, when I could manage to get out of gym classes and sports - using my allergies as an excuse - and climb the hill behind school till I found a nice place to settle down with a notebook and look at Spokane spread out below.

Carolyn Kizer