Marie Howe Quotes

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

  Marie Howe

  Alive, Knows, Dies

  "Poet Marie Howe On 'What The Living Do' After Loss". "Fresh Air" with Terry Gross, www.npr.org. October 19, 2011.

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• 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.

  Marie Howe

  Silence, Complicated, Complexes

  18 Copy quote

• Memory is a poet, not an historian.

  Marie Howe

  Memories, Poet, Historian

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• 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.

  Marie Howe

  Sleep, Tangled, Plight

  "The Good Thief". Book by Marie Howe, 1988.

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• 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.

  Marie Howe

  Writing, Thinking, Discovery

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• 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.

  Marie Howe

  Glasses, Hair, Remember You

  "What The Living Do". Book by Marie Howe, November 17, 1997.

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• 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.

  Marie Howe

  Stories, Alive, Firsts

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

  Marie Howe

  Stories, Body, Forget

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• I am living. I remember you.

  Marie Howe

  Remember You, Remembers You, Remember

  Marie Howe (1999). “What the Living Do: Poems”, p.90, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Poetry is telling something to someone.

  Marie Howe

  Poetry Is

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• Each of us suffers with envy/for the forgiven.

  Marie Howe

  Envy, Suffering, Forgiven

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

  Marie Howe

  Crime, Retribution, Traitor

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