51 Quotes by Alison Hawthorne Deming

When we’re writing anything, we’re bearing witness to the time we live in and how it’s different from any other time in history.

I’m just really interested in the interface of the individual with the collective. I think that’s where the arts live.

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

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.

I think you have to live inside your contradictions and find a way to accept that that’s the human condition – to be forced to live in contradiction.

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.

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.

As writers, the world is not about individual expression entirely because we are producing works of literature and getting them out into the world.

I’m trying to learn something about making a balance between the inner life and the outer life. I wouldn’t write if I didn’t need to be making those discoveries, if I didn’t feel the perpetual ignorance of being a human being.