Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" I was like the family clown. The middle child entertaining. I was a lousy student, but interestingly, the nuns always let me write plays or do drawings, endless special projects. "

Eileen Myles

Child

Special

Family

Related Quotes:

" Fred Moten is a poet I really love because he changes who is telling the poem all the time. "

" I made myself into a poet because it was the first thing I really loved. It was an act of will. "

" Weirdly, the past starts to be about something else. It becomes about style in a way that it wasn't about, and I don't mean writing style, but cultural style. "

" I'm the weird poet who has paid her dues in the experimental world for 30 or 40 years. "

" Lyndon Johnson, I know for a fact, was a great president. And I don't mean by that he was a great man. "

" With Instagram, you're captioning a moment. Twitter is the caption without the image. Even if it's there, the words come first. "

" Literature is love. I think it went like this: drawings in the cave, sounds in the cave, songs in the cave, songs about us. Later, stories about us. "

" Poetry and novels are lists of our devotions. We love the feel of making the marks as the feelings are rising and falling. "

" I wake up with a sense of wonder. I don't dread the future. I like it. "

Eileen Myles

Future

Sense

" To be a poet, it's a challenge to do it in poverty, to do it in wealth. To do it in the academy, to do it in a relationship where you're happy. Everything changes the game. To do it in the awkward state of love, despair, dying. You just have to work it. "

" In Arlington, people would laugh at you if you tried to get people to look at your drawings or listen to your poetry. It was like you thought you were special. "

" The thing about not being historically a mainstream writer is that everyone feels like you're theirs: you're their friend. "

Eileen Myles

Friend

Everyone

" I wasn't afraid of being poor. I didn't want to live in a big house. I'm the perfect size for poetry. I can move around. "

" Poetry from the bottom up is an act of selection: you kind of feel your way through the crowds of poems. The good ones came forward a long time ago, and the bad ones fell away. "

" A vote should be generative, not like business as usual, which is what voting feels like for most of us. "

Eileen Myles

Most

" If you have a dog, and you're a person whose moods are constantly changing, there's a moment when you look at the dog, and you feel bad for them because they're attached to you, and so it's funny for the dog to vocalize those things in some ways. "

" I'm proud that I've never stopped writing about being poor. "

" Evolution is not an even process. There are surges, and there are micromoments. Certainly a career as an artist is that way. "

" I've grown to love Barack Obama. Hillary is no Bernie Sanders. But she's a politician, and she understands Congress. And I think with that kind of twisted beauty, she could lead our country. "

" Somehow, the whole idea of me writing art reviews was just too much of a complicated thought, but I liked art, and later on I just realized that it would be perhaps a pleasure, and so I decided to do it for 'Art in America' - a lot. "

" The only job that ever really worked for me was teaching because you are your own master once you get into the room. You just have to show up on time and talk about what you care about. "

Eileen Myles

Job

Care

" When somebody's in love with you, they think it's amazing you've written them a poem, and when they don't love you anymore, they hate those poems. They wish those poems would go away. "

" I'd like to sit down with Hillary Clinton onstage and ask her about Glass Steagall and all the big banks and her own campaign contributions. "

" As a human being, I'm kind of a cheery melancholic. I have energy; I'm happy. "

" I love Canada, and I dated someone who was Canadian a few years ago, and she brought me into a deeper understanding of the greatness of the culture. "

" I tend to view my life as an accident, almost as a dream. "

" Everybody loved me running for president in '91 and '92 because they never knew a presidential candidate before. "

" I started writing poems, and when I first tried prose, I wrote bad articles and essays and columns, and I didn't have a handle on it. I didn't go to a school that really taught you how to write that stuff. "

" When we have relationships with animals, we often make up who they are. "

Eileen Myles

Who

Relationships

" I've had a lifelong waiting-for-the-other-shoe-to-drop feeling when something good happens. "