Diane di Prima Quotes

• I think the poet is the last person who is still speaking the truth when no one else dares to. I think the poet is the first person to begin the shaping and visioning of the new forms and the new consciousness when no one else has begun to sense it; I think these are two of the most essential human functions.

  Diane di Prima

  Truth, Thinking, Two

  63 Copy quote

• The only war is the war against the imagination.

  Diane di Prima

  War, Imagination

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• I have just realized that the stakes are myself I have no other ransom money, nothing to break or barter but my life

  Diane di Prima

  Ransom, Break, Stakes

  Diane Di Prima (2007). “Revolutionary Letters”, p.7, Last Gasp

  12 Copy quote

• In the fifties… we were so busy being cool that we didn’t know how to say the word love

  Diane di Prima

  Busy, Being Cool, Words Love

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• Sweetheart, when you break thru you'll find a poet here, not quite what one would choose.

  Diane di Prima

  Sweetheart, Poet, Break

  Diane Di Prima (2014). “The Poetry Deal”, p.2, City Lights Publishers

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• More or Less Love Poems #11: No babe We'd never Swing together but the syncopation would be something wild

  Diane di Prima

  Swings, Together, Would Be

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• It is still news to her that passion could steer her wrong though she went down, a thousand times strung out across railroad tracks, off bridges under cars, or stiff glass bottle still in hand, hair soft on greasy pillows, still it is news she cannot follow love (his burning footsteps in blue crystal snow) & still come out all right.

  Diane di Prima

  Passion, Glasses, Hair

  12 Copy quote

• Maketa Groves has a strong, bright lyric gift. Her poems come out of music and are full of music. They bring us the sounds of the streets and the sounds of nature, and make us see once again that they are parts of the same song. She celebrates American lives as they are lived today: the mother scrubbing her kitchen floor at midnight, the drag-queens in the Tenderloin, the homeless woman knitting in the courtyard. This is poetry that relentlessly shows us the beauty in the world, with all its struggles and complexity, and demands that we go out to meet it with open hearts.

  Diane di Prima

  Mother, Song, Strong

  9 Copy quote

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