Maxine Kumin Quotes

We are, each of us, our own prisoner. We are locked up in our own story.

Love, we are a small pond.

When Sleeping Beauty wakes up, she is almost fifty years old

It is important to act as if bearing witness matters.

Everything pays for growing tame.

I didn't write my poems because I wanted to, they were wrung from me. I had to write them.

God serves the choosy. They know what to want.

One way of ending the poem is to turn it back on itself, like a serpent with its tail in its mouth.

... people get confidential at midnight.

Cherish your wilderness.

Nature is a catchment of sorrows.

The tougher the form the easier it is for me to handle the poem, because the form gives permission to be very gut honest about feelings.

Sometimes tradition is a way of keeping going.

Women are not supposed to have uteruses, especially in poems.

I'm going home the old way with a light hand on the reins making the long approach.

Poetry makes nothing happen. It survives in the valley of its saying.

Meanwhile let us cast one shadow in air and water.

To build is to dwell.

Can it be I am the only Jew residing in Danville, Kentuchy, looking for matzoh in the Safeway and the A & P?

And the pond's stillness nippled as if by rain instead is pocked with life.

The time on either side of now stands fast.

That's my prescription for a happy marriage - marry someone who doesn't do anything similar to what you do.