Maxine Kumin famous quotes

04-27-2025

We are, each of us, our own prisoner. We are locked up in our own story.
-- Maxine Kumin

#Stories #Locked Up #Prisoner
Here on the drawing board fingers and noses leak from the air brush maggots lie under if i should die before if i should die in the back room stacked up in smooth boxes like soapflakes or tunafish wait the undreamt of.
-- Maxine Kumin

#Lying #Drawing #Air
Love, we are a small pond.
-- Maxine Kumin

#Love #Ponds
Everything pays for growing tame.
-- Maxine Kumin

#Growing #Pay
Cherish your wilderness.
-- Maxine Kumin

#Wilderness #Cherish
Women are not supposed to have uteruses, especially in poems.
-- Maxine Kumin

#Women #Poetry #Uterus
I didn't write my poems because I wanted to, they were wrung from me. I had to write them.
-- Maxine Kumin

#Writing #Poetry #Wanted
One way of ending the poem is to turn it back on itself, like a serpent with its tail in its mouth.
-- Maxine Kumin

#Poetry #Mouths #Way
To write about the monstrous sense of alienation the poet feels in this culture of polarized hatreds is a way of staying sane. With the poem, I reach out to an audience equally at odds with official policy, and I celebrate our mutual humanness in an inhuman world.
-- Maxine Kumin

#Writing #Odds #Hatred
My writing time needs to surround itself with empty stretches, or at least unpeopled ones, for the writing takes place in an area of suspension as in a hanging nest that is almost entirely encapsulated.
-- Maxine Kumin

#Writing #Nests #Needs
It is important to act as if bearing witness matters.
-- Maxine Kumin

#Important #Matter #Bearing Witness
God serves the choosy. They know what to want ...
-- Maxine Kumin

#God #Want #Choosy
To build is to dwell.
-- Maxine Kumin

#Building
Sometimes tradition is a way of keeping going.
-- Maxine Kumin

#Way #Sometimes #Tradition
... people get confidential at midnight.
-- Maxine Kumin

#People #Midnight #Confidential
When Sleeping Beauty wakes up, she is almost fifty years old
-- Maxine Kumin

#Sleep #Years #Fifty
The time on either side of now stands fast.
-- Maxine Kumin

#Time #Sides
Nature is a catchment of sorrows.
-- Maxine Kumin

#Nature #Sorrow
And the pond's stillness nippled as if by rain instead is pocked with life.
-- Maxine Kumin

#Life #Rain #Ponds
Can it be I am the only Jew residing in Danville, Kentuchy, looking for matzoh in the Safeway and the A & P?
-- Maxine Kumin

#Judaism #Jew
Poetry makes nothing happen. It survives in the valley of its saying.
-- Maxine Kumin

#Poetry #Valleys #Things Happen

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