Alison Hawthorne Deming Quotes

Quotes about:

• It's extremely important that, as writers, we give a voice to those who don't have voices, including the other animals that we share the planet with and the places that are endangered or being lost.

  Alison Hawthorne Deming

  Animal, Voice, Giving

  Nashville Review Interview, as.vanderbilt.edu. December 1, 2012.

  7 Copy quote

• There is a difference between our wisdom and nature's simplicity. That reflects the burden of a complex intelligence. A complex intelligence like ours is impotent compared to the intelligence of a monarch butterfly migrating from Canada to Mexico, or the intelligence of hummingbirds that have co-evolved with the flowers all along their migration route. That seems so simple; it just happens, it just unfolds.

  Alison Hawthorne Deming

  Flower, Butterfly, Simple

  38 Copy quote

• There are landscapes and species that are not going to be here a hundred years from now, fifty years from now. One gift we as writers give to the world is to bear witness to these landscapes and species as we have experienced them.

  Alison Hawthorne Deming

  Years, Giving, World

  Nashville Review Interview, as.vanderbilt.edu. December 1, 2012.

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• We're nature. Our minds are nature. Our desire to make poetry is nature.

  Alison Hawthorne Deming

  Mind, Desire, Poetry Is

  Nashville Review Interview, as.vanderbilt.edu. December 1, 2012.

  4 Copy quote

• We're facing enormous changes in our planetary life, with climate change and the adaptations that all natural systems are going to have to make to these climate changes, and so it's extremely important to bear witness to what's happening.

  Alison Hawthorne Deming

  Important, Climate, Bears

  Nashville Review Interview, as.vanderbilt.edu. December 1, 2012.

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• Earth's immune system - its rapid response team of self-protection - becomes invigorated at times of peril. And one sees it at play now in the upwelling of grassroots work aimed at finding a sustainable future.

  Alison Hawthorne Deming

  Team, Self, Play

  Interview with Simmons B. Buntin, www.terrain.org. September 22, 2010.

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• The world is going to be less biologically rich for quite some time in the future. We are always weeping that we live in such a diminished world, but we are experiencing a biologically rich world compared to what the future will look like. Bearing witness to that is a beautiful gift.

  Alison Hawthorne Deming

  Beautiful, Looks, World

  Nashville Review Interview, as.vanderbilt.edu. December 1, 2012.

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• I'm always trying to ask myself both "Who am I as an individual?" and "What are the cultural forces that have made me the person that I am?" How can I understand myself as a cultural creature as well as an individual? I'm really obsessed with that question, and always asking my students to consider it.

  Alison Hawthorne Deming

  Always Trying, Asking, Students

  Nashville Review Interview, as.vanderbilt.edu. December 1, 2012.

  4 Copy quote

• I'm extremely interested in science as the mythos within which I live. Science tells me what kind of animal I am, what kind of a universe I live in. It's always deepening my understanding of the natural world.

  Alison Hawthorne Deming

  Animal, Understanding, World

  Nashville Review Interview, as.vanderbilt.edu. December 1, 2012.

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• A lot of times students will come up to me and say, "Well, I can't write because I don't know what I think about such-and-such." And I say, "That's why you have to write." You don't wait until you know, because then who cares - it's static.

  Alison Hawthorne Deming

  Writing, Thinking, Waiting

  Nashville Review Interview, as.vanderbilt.edu. December 1, 2012.

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• If you have this deep feeling of empathy for the natural world, you feel it so profoundly. It's almost a religious experience. I feel that I could never really say the depth of feeling or connection I feel to the natural world, which has made me.

  Alison Hawthorne Deming

  Religious, Empathy, Feelings

  Nashville Review Interview, as.vanderbilt.edu. December 1, 2012.

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• One needs to be on guard against expecting external powers to decide when you can take yourself seriously as an artist. It can be a long wait - and lead to endless appetite.

  Alison Hawthorne Deming

  Artist, Long, Waiting

  Interview with Simmons B. Buntin, www.terrain.org. September 22, 2010.

  4 Copy quote

• Once you realize that human actions affect every bit of earth and sky, you realize that the environment isn't just what surrounds us - it's all one whole.

  Alison Hawthorne Deming

  Sky, Earth, Action

  Nashville Review Interview, as.vanderbilt.edu. December 1, 2012.

  7 Copy quote

• You see this incredible capacity for replication in nature, survival, development, all of these things that are around us all the time in nature that just happen. By comparison, human life is really, really complicated. We're gifted animals, but we are so complicated. Nothing is easy for us, except maybe eating too much.

  Alison Hawthorne Deming

  Animal, Survival, Development

  Nashville Review Interview, as.vanderbilt.edu. December 1, 2012.

  4 Copy quote

• I am a result of what has happened on this planet - how could I find the art to say that? I can't, and yet, I am drawn to it because of the enormity of it. That seems really important.

  Alison Hawthorne Deming

  Art, Important, Results

  Nashville Review Interview, as.vanderbilt.edu. December 1, 2012.

  7 Copy quote

• I'm filled with despair. We live in a pathological culture filled with rage and bitterness and greed. The hate-mongering and racism is reaching a frightening pitch.

  Alison Hawthorne Deming

  Hate, Racism, Greed

  Interview with Simmons B. Buntin, www.terrain.org. September 22, 2010.

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• Bringing science into poetry is one way of acknowledging some of the richest stuff that is in my cultural moment.

  Alison Hawthorne Deming

  Stuff, Way, Moments

  Nashville Review Interview, as.vanderbilt.edu. December 1, 2012.

  6 Copy quote

• I don't know much about death and the sorriest lesson I've learned is that words, my most trusted guardians against chaos, offer small comfort in the face of anyone's dying.

  Alison Hawthorne Deming

  Dying, Comfort, Lessons

  Alison Hawthorne Deming (1994). “Temporary Homelands”

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• I've been accused of darkness
  by my inner light.

  Alison Hawthorne Deming

  Light, Darkness, Inner Light

  Alison Deming (2016). “Stairway to Heaven: Poems”, p.10, Penguin

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• What keeps me level is the refusal to let the best of human aspirations die in the face of the challenges. I make a moral decision to be hopeful.

  Alison Hawthorne Deming

  Hopeful, Decision, Challenges

  Interview with Simmons B. Buntin, www.terrain.org. September 22, 2010.

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• For the poets, my hope is that they will, quite simply, feel the obligation to be really informed about the situation in which we find ourselves, in terms of our imperiled planet. You should inform yourself so deeply that it becomes part of your nature, part of your voice.

  Alison Hawthorne Deming

  Voice, Poet, Should

  Nashville Review Interview, as.vanderbilt.edu. December 1, 2012.

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• I had wanted for so many years to feel that writing really was at the center of my life, not something I did in my spare time. So the writing and teaching feel in some way to be one thing - the personal engagement and the social engagement good partners.

  Alison Hawthorne Deming

  Teaching, Writing, Years

  Interview with Simmons B. Buntin, www.terrain.org. September 22, 2010.

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• The environment is becoming so much a central concern, I see environmental concerns just bleeding into poetries all over the place. My hope is that we won't have these environmental poets tucked over here and everybody else doing cool stuff with language and consciousness elsewhere, but that all of it will become one thing.

  Alison Hawthorne Deming

  Environmental, Stuff, Bleeding

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• Climate change is a moral challenge, not simply an economic or technological problem. It is linked to social justice, because it is the poor citizens of the world who will suffer the most from our excesses.

  Alison Hawthorne Deming

  Justice, Challenges, Suffering

  Interview with Simmons B. Buntin, www.terrain.org. September 22, 2010.

  7 Copy quote

• As deaths have accumulated I have begun to think of life and death as a set of balance scales. When one is young, the scale is heavily tipped toward the living. With the first death, the first consciousness of death, the counter scale begins to fall. Death by death, the scales shift weight until what was unthinkable becomes merely a matter of gravity and the fall into death becomes an easy step.

  Alison Hawthorne Deming

  Death, Fall, Thinking

  Alison Hawthorne Deming (1994). “Temporary Homelands”

  4 Copy quote

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