Dorianne Laux Quotes

You’ve traveled this far on the back of every mistake.

Good writing works from a simple premise: your experience is not yours alone, but in some sense a metaphor for everyone's.

That's how it is sometimes--God comes to your window, all bright light and black wings, and you're just too tired to open it.

A poem is like a child; at some point we have to let it go and trust that it will make its own way in the world.

Every good poem asks a question, and every good poet asks every question.

Every poem I write falls short in some important way. But I go on trying to write the one that won’t.

We continue to speak, if only in whispers, to something inside us that longs to be named.

I have always loved too much, or not enough.

Maybe it's what we don't say/that saves us.

Who you are contributes to your poetry in a number of important ways, but you shouldn't identify with your poems so closely that when they are cut, you're the one that bleeds.

Tinted Distances is a tender meditation that reveals a careful eye and steady devotion to elegy and ode.

We're all writing out of a wound, and that's where our song comes from. The wound is singing. We're singing back to those who've been wounded.

You are not your poetry. Your self-esteem shouldn't depend on whether you publish, or whether some editor or writer you admire thinks you're any good.

When you have worked with people all day who have so little and struggle to make it stretch, who live outside the rarefied, you are humbled.

I don't know if we ever have enough distance to "see" our own trajectory. We're in the muddled middle of it. Who knows what will last, what poems will take hold of the imaginations of the future.

I would say my life experiences are my poetry, whether I'm writing about those actual, factual experiences or not.

There's no word for what Young does, only for what he accomplishes-the capturing of small, daily miracles.

There is so much about the process of writing that is mysterious to me, but this one thing I've found to be true: writing begets writing.

I share my life experiences as a poet with my students. My poetic difficulties, joys, struggles and discoveries. If I read a new poem or essay or book I'm excited about, I bring it in.

I am the flesh boat of my experiences, we all are , my feelings, thoughts, desires and dreams are captured in my body's pliant cells, fastened onto my DNA.

I also have my backpack of the tried-and-true, and because it is new to [my students], it becomes fresh to me again as well.

The students always, always surprise me.

W.S Merwin says "after three days of rain" and I write "After Twelve Days of Rain." I like his quietude. I admire his ability to be simple without being simplistic.

If trees could speak they wouldn't

I feel deep gratitude for the life poetry has allowed me to live. I know the life I could have lived without it. Both on the physical plain, and the soul plain. Poetry helps us endure.

I love people and psychology. As a writer, I’m not so interested in Fred getting from the living room to the car. I want to go inside Fred’s soul and play there.

I try to avoid calling myself a poet because I think that's something someone else has to call you. It's like bragging.

The more that accrues, the more depth, weight, and breadth we can bring to the poems, which we then need to throw overboard so we don't sink.

I'm not the only person in the world who is suffering. I'm trying to talk to the world, responding to those voices.

How many losses does it take to stop a heart, to lay waste to the vocabularies of desire?