Alicia Ostriker Quotes
With women poets we look at or into, but not up at, sacred things; we unlearn submission.
Alicia Ostriker
Quotes to Explore
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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.
Muhammad Ali
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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.
William Hazlitt
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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.
William Wordsworth
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I prefer the absurdity of writing poems to the absurdity of not writing poems.
Wislawa Szymborska
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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?"
Michael Stipe
R.E.M.
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The whole history of civilization is strewn with creeds and institutions which were invaluable at first, and deadly afterwards.
Walter Bagehot
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Bible worship, though at its best it may achieve sublimity by keeping its head in the skies, may also make itself both ridiculousand dangerous by having its feet off the ground.
George Bernard Shaw
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There were the usual exhortations to purity – think of the novel not as your opportunity to get rich or famous but to wrestle, in your own way, with the titans of the form – exhortations poets don’t have to make, given the economic marginality of the art, an economic marginality that soon all literature will share.
Ben Lerner
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If an artwork never gets any attention from anybody, then obviously it's got problems. If it gains attention from a very small elite, then it's presumably doing something. Finnegans Wake gets a lot of attention from certain people who become passionate about it, who are usually very good readers in general. Although - I often talk about costs and benefits - it seems to me the costs of reading Finnegans Wake are not worth the benefits, however many there may be. And it's the same with the more arcane among poets, Zukofsky and so on.
Brian Boyd
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I would have picked up the artificial heart and thrown it on the floor and walked out and said he's dead if the press had not been there.
William DeVries
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With women poets we look at or into, but not up at, sacred things; we unlearn submission.
Alicia Ostriker
