Maxine Kumin quotes
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“We are, each of us, our own prisoner. We are locked up in our own story.”
-- Maxine KuminSource : Maxine Kumin (1978). “The retrieval system: poems”, Viking Pr
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“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 KuminSource : Maxine Kumin (1970). “The nightmare factory”
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“Love, we are a small pond.”
-- Maxine KuminSource : Maxine Kumin (1970). “The nightmare factory”
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“Women are not supposed to have uteruses, especially in poems.”
-- Maxine Kumin -
“I didn't write my poems because I wanted to, they were wrung from me. I had to write them.”
-- Maxine Kumin -
“One way of ending the poem is to turn it back on itself, like a serpent with its tail in its mouth.”
-- Maxine Kumin -
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“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 KuminSource : Maxine Kumin (2000). “Always Beginning: Essays on a Life in Poetry”
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“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 KuminSource : Maxine Kumin (1996). “Women, Animals & Vegetables: Essays & Stories”
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“It is important to act as if bearing witness matters.”
-- Maxine KuminSource : Maxine Kumin (2000). “Always Beginning: Essays on a Life in Poetry”
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“God serves the choosy. They know what to want ...”
-- Maxine KuminSource : Maxine Kumin (1965). “The privilege”
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“Sometimes tradition is a way of keeping going.”
-- Maxine KuminSource : Maxine Kumin (1974). “The designated heir”, Viking Adult
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“... people get confidential at midnight.”
-- Maxine KuminSource : Maxine Kumin (1974). “The designated heir”, Viking Adult
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“When Sleeping Beauty wakes up, she is almost fifty years old”
-- Maxine Kumin -
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“The time on either side of now stands fast.”
-- Maxine Kumin -
“Nature is a catchment of sorrows.”
-- Maxine KuminSource : "Go Be a King in a Field of Weeds" by Carol Muske, www.nytimes.com. November 5, 1989.
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“And the pond's stillness nippled as if by rain instead is pocked with life.”
-- Maxine Kumin -
“Can it be I am the only Jew residing in Danville, Kentuchy, looking for matzoh in the Safeway and the A & P?”
-- Maxine KuminSource : Maxine Kumin (2000). “Always Beginning: Essays on a Life in Poetry”
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“Poetry makes nothing happen. It survives in the valley of its saying.”
-- Maxine KuminSource : Maxine Kumin (2015). “The Pawnbroker's Daughter: A Memoir”, p.40, W. W. Norton & Company
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