Best 35 quotes of Marilyn Hacker on MyQuotes

As a teacher you are more or less obliged to pay the same amount of attention to everything. That can wear you down.

Clearly, once the student is no longer a student the possibilities of relationship are enlarged.

Community means people spending time together here, and I don't think there's really that.

Did you love well what very soon you left? Come home and take me in your arms and take away this stomach ache, headache, heartache. Never so full, I never was bereft so utterly. The winter evenings drift dark to the window. Not one work will make you, where you are, turn in your day, or wake from your night toward me. The only gift I got to keep or give is what I've cried, floodgates let down to mourning for the dead chances, for the end of being young, for everyone I loved who really died. I drank our one year out in brine instead of honey from the seasons of your tongue.

Did you love well what you very soon left? Come home and take me in your arms and take away this stomach ache, headache, heartache.

Everyone thinks they're going to write one book of poems or one novel.

Given the devaluation of literature and of the study of foreign languages per se in the United States, as well as the preponderance of theory over text in graduate literature studies, creative writing programs keep literature courses populated.

I don't think it's by accident that I was first attracted to translating two French women poets.

I have experienced healing through other writers' poetry, but there's no way I can sit down to write in the hope a poem will have healing potential. If I do, I'll write a bad poem.

I lived in the studio apartment that I bought for four years before I bought it in 1989, so I was already in it. I began living there in 1985, so I've had the same address and phone number since then.

I'm addicted to email, but other than that, there are practical things - being able to buy a book on the internet that you can't find in your local bookshop. This could be a lifeline if you live further from the sources.

i'm alternatingly brilliant and witless-and sleepless: bed is just a swamp to roll in.

I started to send my work to journals when I was 26, which was just a question of when I got the courage up. They were mostly journals I had been reading for the previous six or seven years.

I think there is something about coming to a city to work that puts you in touch with it in a different way.

I've been an inveterate reader of literary magazines since I was a teenager. There are always discoveries. You're sitting in your easy chair, reading; you realize you've read a story or a group of poems four times, and you know, Yes, I want to go farther with this writer.

I wonder what it means about American literary culture and its transmission when I consider the number of American poets who earn their living teaching creative writing in universities. I've ended up doing that myself.

I worked at all kinds of jobs, mostly commercial editing.

My mother was told she couldn't go to medical school because she was a woman and a Jew. So she became a teacher in the New York City public school system.

Of the individual poems, some are more lyric and some are more descriptive or narrative. Each poem is fixed in a moment. All those moments written or read together take on the movement and architecture of a narrative.

Paris is a wonderful city. I can't say I belong to an especially anglophone community.

Perhaps first and foremost is the challenge of taking what I find as a reader and making it into a poem that, primarily, has to be a plausible poem in English.

Poetry seems to have been eliminated as a literary genre, and installed instead, as a kind of spiritual aerobic exercise - nobody need read it, but anybody can do it.

The ambiguities of language, both in terms of vocabulary and syntax, are fascinating: how important connotation is, what is lost and what is gained in the linguistic transition.

The phenomenon of university creative writing programs doesn't exist in France. The whole idea is regarded as a novelty, or an oddity.

The pull between sound and syntax creates a kind of musical tension in the language that interests me.

There is a way in which all writing is connected. In a second language, for example, a workshop can liberate the students' use of the vocabulary they're acquiring.

The woman poet must be either a sexless, reclusive eccentric, with nothing to say specifically to women, or a brilliant, tragic, tortured suicide.

Translation is an interestingly different way to be involved both with poetry and with the language that I've found myself living in much of the time. I think the two feed each other.

Translation makes me look at how a poem is put together in a different way, without the personal investment of the poem I'm writing myself, but equally closely technically.

We sometimes received - and I would read - 200 manuscripts a week. Some of them were wonderful, some were terrible; most were mediocre. It was like the gifts of the good and bad fairies.

When you translate poetry in particular, you're obliged to look at how the writer with whom you're working puts together words, sentences, phrases, the triple tension between the line of verse, the syntax and the sentence.

With, or despite our scars, we stay alive.

Women love a sick child or a healthy animal; A man who is both itches them like an incubus.

You are almost not free, if you are teaching a group of graduate students, to become friends with one of them. I don't mean anything erotically charged, just a friendship.

From Orient Point The art of living isn't hard to muster: Enjoy the hour, not what it might portend. When someone makes you promises, don't trust her unless they're in the here and now, and just her willing largesse free-handed to a friend. The art of living isn't hard to muster: groom the old dog, her coat gets back its luster; take brisk walks so you're hungry at the end. When someone makes you promises, don't trust her to know she can afford what they will cost her to keep until they're kept. Till then, pretend the art of living isn't hard to muster. Cooking, eating and drinking are a cluster of pleasures. Next time, don't go round the bend when someone makes you promises. Don't trust her past where you'd trust yourself, and don't adjust her words to mean more to you than she'd intend. The art of living isn't hard to muster. You never had her, so you haven't lost her like spare house keys. Whatever she opens, when someone makes you promises, don't. Trust your art; go on living: that's not hard to muster.