Carolyn Kizer Quotes

• You cannot meet someone for a moment, or even cast eyes on someone in the street, without changing. That is my subject.

  Carolyn Kizer

  Eye, Moments, Casts

  50 Copy quote

• You write for the people in high school who ignored you. We all do.

  Carolyn Kizer

  Writing, School, People

  14 Copy quote

• Poems, to me, do not come from ideas, they come from a series of images that you tuck away in the back of your brain. Little photographic snapshots. Then you get the major vision of the poem, which is like a giant magnet to which all these disparate little impressions fly and adhere, and there is the poem!

  Carolyn Kizer

  Ideas, Brain, Vision

  11 Copy quote

• He said, "You have pigs in this poem; pigs are not poetic." I got up and walked out of that class and never went back.

  Carolyn Kizer

  Teaching, Pigs, Class

  8 Copy quote

• Poets are interested mostly in death and commas.

  Carolyn Kizer

  Writing, Crafts, Poet

  8 Copy quote

• Our masks, always in peril of smearing or cracking, in need of continuous check in the mirror or silverware, keep us in thrall to ourselves, concerned with our surfaces.

  Carolyn Kizer

  Mirrors, Needs, Faces

  Carolyn Kizer (2002). “Cool, Calm, and Collected: Poems 1960-2000”, p.115, Copper Canyon Press

  9 Copy quote

• We live in wonder, blaze in a cycle of passion and apprehension.

  Carolyn Kizer

  Passion, Wonder, Apprehension

  Carolyn Kizer (2002). “Cool, Calm, and Collected: Poems 1960-2000”, p.144, Copper Canyon Press

  8 Copy quote

• What is so marvelous about living today is that it is possible to extend, like a flower, spreading petals in all directions.

  Carolyn Kizer

  Flower, Today, Petals

  7 Copy quote

• In some ways painters have been more important in my life than writers. Painters teach you how to see—a faculty that usually isn’t highly developed in poets. Whether you take a walk in the woods with a painter, or go to a museum with one, through them you notice shapes, colors, harmonies, relationships that enhance your own seeing.

  Carolyn Kizer

  Museums, Color, Important

  7 Copy quote

• I happen to believe that there are a lot of good poets around at present, but a poet like Alex Kuo, who possesses a highly developed moral sense and a bitter honesty, is rare at any time and especially in this time. We need him.

  Carolyn Kizer

  Honesty, Believe, Needs

  6 Copy quote

• A poet, to whom no one cruel or imposing listens,
  Disdained by senates, whispers to your dust.

  Carolyn Kizer

  Dust, Poet, Senate

  "Cool, Calm, and Collected: Poems 1960-2000".

  6 Copy quote

• She tended to be impatient with that sort of intellectual who, for all his brilliance, has never been able to arrive at the simple conclusion that to be reasonably happy you have to be reasonably good.

  Carolyn Kizer

  Simple, Intellectual, Able

  4 Copy quote

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