Best 7 quotes of Alicia Ostriker on MyQuotes

Art destroys silence.

I have wished you dead and myself dead. How could it be otherwise. I have broken into you like a burglar. And you've set your dogs on me. And a pile of broken sticks. A child could kick. I have climbed you like a monument, gasoing, For the exercise and the view, And leaned over the railing at the top... Strong and warm, the summer wind.

I love the combination of smartness, pain, and what one might call conscious postmodern trashiness in this book: a version of the erotic full of nervous tension which animates the sensuality, and also Zimroth's feeling for words, compressed, ironic, withholding, but also 'asking for it . . . the siege, the thrill, the battle fatigue.' A profoundly urban book, of harsh memory and fantasy, set in harsher reality.

The work of Jana Harris is unique in American writing. She has always had a voice of true grit—sometimes harsh, sometimes funny, always close to the bone, tart, and indomitable.

The writer who is a mother should, I think, record everything she can: make notes, keep journals, take photographs, use a tape recorder, and remind herself that there is a subject so incalculably vast significance to humanity, about which virtually nothing is known because writers have not been mothers.

It’s not that the old are wise But that we thirst for the wisdom we had at twenty when we understood everything when our brains bubbled with tingling insights percolating up from our brilliant genitals when our music rang like a global siege shooting down all the lies in the world oh then we knew the truth then we sparkled like mica in granite and now we stand on the shore of an ocean that rises and rises but is too salt to drink

The appropriation of the creativity-procreativity metaphor by women is a conscious challenge to traditional poetics and beyond that to traditional metaphysics, for the gynocentric vision is not that Logos condescends to incarnate itself, but that Flesh becomes Word.