Alicia Ostriker Quotes
With women poets we look at or into, but not up at, sacred things; we unlearn submission.
Quotes to Explore
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Perhaps a hundred people assembled one evening, May 15, 1876, at the time when the country was celebrating the hundredth anniversary of its political independence.
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I suppose I sometimes used to act like I wasn't a human being... Sometimes I look back at myself and remember things I used to say, or my hairstyle, and I cringe.
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When a belief becomes more than an instrument, you are lost. You remain lost until you learn what 'belief' is really for.
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The air campaign is going to continue, ... The Yugoslav government hasn't done anything positive.
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Whether it's boxing, basketball, or badminton, one must be ready to succeed before entering the arena...long before the lights come up.
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A man's reputation is not in his own keeping, but lies at the mercy of the profligacy of others. Calumny requires no proof.
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I should dread to disfigure the beautiful ideal of the memories of illustrious persons with incongruous features, and to sully the imaginative purity of classical works with gross and trivial recollections.
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I prefer the absurdity of writing poems to the absurdity of not writing poems.
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By the time [of modern] generation was coming of age sexually, there was already this idea of safe sex. But that didn't exist for me. I came out of the free-swinging '60s and '70s. It was free love, baby. That was it. We had very liberal sex-ed classes in 1973, a yearlong environmental science class, and then Women's Lib and Gay Liberation. So it's insane to go from that to Reagan and AIDS. It was like, "What happened? Where's my future?"
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Shakespeare is dangerous to young poets; they cannot but reproduce him, while they fancy that they produce themselves.
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It's always a better choice to write a new book than it is to keep pounding your head against the submissions wall with a book that's just not happening. The next book you write could be the book, the one that isn't a fight to get representation for at all.
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Poets are people who can still see the world through the eyes of children.
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Blind submission in women is considered a virtue, while submission to wrong is itself wrong, and resistance to wrong is virtue alike in women as in man.
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We're going to hammer guns on the anvil of relentless legislative strategy! We're going to beat guns into submission!
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With women poets we look at or into, but not up at, sacred things; we unlearn submission.
