Marie Howe Quotes

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

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

Memory is a poet, not an historian.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

I am living. I remember you.

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.

Each of us suffers with envy/for the forgiven.

Poetry is telling something to someone.