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Carolyn Kizer Quotes

You cannot meet someone for a moment, or even cast eyes on someone in the street, without changing. That is my subject.

You cannot meet someone for a moment, or even cast eyes on someone in the street, without changing. That is my subject.

Carolyn Kizer
Eye, Moments, Casts

You write for the people in high school who ignored you. We all do.

Carolyn Kizer
Writing, School, People

Poems, to me, do not come from ideas, they come from a series of images that you tuck away in the back of your brain. Little photographic snapshots. Then you get the major vision of the poem, which is like a giant magnet to which all these disparate little impressions fly and adhere, and there is the poem!

Carolyn Kizer
Ideas, Brain, Vision

He said, "You have pigs in this poem; pigs are not poetic." I got up and walked out of that class and never went back.

Carolyn Kizer
Teaching, Pigs, Class

Poets are interested mostly in death and commas.

Carolyn Kizer
Writing, Crafts, Poet

Our masks, always in peril of smearing or cracking, in need of continuous check in the mirror or silverware, keep us in thrall to ourselves, concerned with our surfaces.

Carolyn Kizer
Mirrors, Needs, Faces
Carolyn Kizer (2002). “Cool, Calm, and Collected: Poems 1960-2000”, p.115, Copper Canyon Press

We live in wonder, blaze in a cycle of passion and apprehension.

Carolyn Kizer
Passion, Wonder, Apprehension
Carolyn Kizer (2002). “Cool, Calm, and Collected: Poems 1960-2000”, p.144, Copper Canyon Press

What is so marvelous about living today is that it is possible to extend, like a flower, spreading petals in all directions.

Carolyn Kizer
Flower, Today, Petals

In some ways painters have been more important in my life than writers. Painters teach you how to see—a faculty that usually isn’t highly developed in poets. Whether you take a walk in the woods with a painter, or go to a museum with one, through them you notice shapes, colors, harmonies, relationships that enhance your own seeing.

Carolyn Kizer
Museums, Color, Important

I happen to believe that there are a lot of good poets around at present, but a poet like Alex Kuo, who possesses a highly developed moral sense and a bitter honesty, is rare at any time and especially in this time. We need him.

Carolyn Kizer
Honesty, Believe, Needs

A poet, to whom no one cruel or imposing listens, Disdained by senates, whispers to your dust.

Carolyn Kizer
Dust, Poet, Senate
"Cool, Calm, and Collected: Poems 1960-2000".

She tended to be impatient with that sort of intellectual who, for all his brilliance, has never been able to arrive at the simple conclusion that to be reasonably happy you have to be reasonably good.

Carolyn Kizer
Simple, Intellectual, Able

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