Top 12 Quotes by Marie Howe

Poetry holds the knowledge that we are alive and that we know we're going to die.

Poetry holds the knowledge that we are alive and that we know we're going to die.

Alive, Knows, Dies

"Poet Marie Howe On 'What The Living Do' After Loss". "Fresh Air" with Terry Gross, www.npr.org. October 19, 2011.

Every poem holds the unspeakable inside it. The unsayable... The thing that you can't really say because it's too complicated. It's too complex for us. Every poem has that silence deep in the center of it.

Marie Howe

Silence, Complicated, Complexes

Memory is a poet, not an historian.

Marie Howe

Memories, Poet, Historian

Bedeviled, human, your plight, in waking, is to choose from the words that even now sleep on your tongue, and to know that tangled among them and terribly new is the sentence that could change your life.

Marie Howe

Sleep, Tangled, Plight

"The Good Thief". Book by Marie Howe, 1988.

When we think we have something to say we are usually wrong. We are fooling ourselves. Trip into discovery. Don't write what you know, discover something new.

Marie Howe

Writing, Thinking, Discovery

But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass, say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a cherishing so deep for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I'm speechless: I am living. I remember you.

Marie Howe

Glasses, Hair, Remember You

"What The Living Do". Book by Marie Howe, November 17, 1997.

We tell each other stories to help each other live. That’s why I read poetry. I read poetry to stay alive. That’s why I went to poetry in the first place, that’s why I stay with it, that’s why I’ll never leave it.

Marie Howe

Stories, Alive, Firsts