Lisel Mueller Quotes

• Poetry, for me, is the answer to, 'How does one stay sane when private lives are being ransacked by public events?' It's something that hangs over your head all the time.

  Lisel Mueller

  Over You, Events, Doe

  45 Copy quote

• How swiftly the strained honey
  of afternoon light
  flows into darkness
  
  and the closed bud shrugs off
  its special mystery
  in order to break into blossom:
  
  as if what exists, exists
  so that it can be lost
  and become precious

  Lisel Mueller

  Light, Order, Darkness

  7 Copy quote

• What luxury, to be so happy
  that we can grieve
  over imaginary lives.

  Lisel Mueller

  Grieving, Luxury, Imaginary

  5 Copy quote

• I want to celebrate these elms which have been spared by the plague, these survivors of a once flourishing tribe commemorated by all the Elm Streets in America. But to celebrate them is to be silent about the people who sit and sleep underneath them, the homeless poor who are hauled away by the city like trash, except it has no place to dump them. To speak of one thing is to suppress another.

  Lisel Mueller

  Sleep, Cities, America

  5 Copy quote

• Everything is autobiography, even if one writes something that is totally objective. The fact that it's a subject that seizes you makes it autobiographical.

  Lisel Mueller

  Writing, Facts, Autobiography

  4 Copy quote

• When I am asked
  how I began writing poems,
  I talk about the indifference of nature.

  Lisel Mueller

  Writing, Indifference, Writing Poems

  6 Copy quote

• Well, language seems to be something that obsesses me. I'm always writing about it.

  Lisel Mueller

  Writing, Language, Wells

  4 Copy quote

• Memory and poetry go together, absolutely. It is a matter of preserving and of remembering things.

  Lisel Mueller

  Memories, Together, Matter

  4 Copy quote

• When I was in college, I did do some writing of poetry, somewhat inspired, I think at that time, by Carl Sandburg, because English was still relatively new to me, and Sandburg, of course, wrote in a very easy-to-understand, very colloquial and informal manner.

  Lisel Mueller

  Writing, College, Thinking

  4 Copy quote

• I am imprinted with the whole sense of European history, especially German history, going back to World War I, which really destroyed all the old values and culture. My grandparents had been reasonably well-off but they became quite poor, living in an attic apartment.

  Lisel Mueller

  War, Grandparent, World

  6 Copy quote

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