44 Quotes by Dorianne Laux

You are not your poetry. Your self-esteem shouldn’t depend on whether you publish, or whether some editor or writer you admire thinks you’re any good.

I am the flesh boat of my experiences, we all are, my feelings, thoughts, desires and dreams are captured in my body’s pliant cells, fastened onto my DNA.

Writing and reading are the only ways to find your voice. It won’t magically burst forth in your poems the next time you sit down to write, or the next; but little by little, as you become aware of more choices and begin to make them – consciously and unconsciously – your style will develop.

A poem is like a child; at some point we have to let it go and trust that it will make its own way in the world.

Who you are contributes to your poetry in a number of important ways, but you shouldn’t identify with your poems so closely that when they are cut, you’re the one that bleeds.

The reason I started writing was because I was a little kid in San Diego who was getting beaten up by her dad and sexually abused and because I felt different than everybody else and I had this big huge secret that was tearing me apart.

I would say my life experiences are my poetry, whether I’m writing about those actual, factual experiences or not.

When you have worked with people all day who have so little and struggle to make it stretch, who live outside the rarefied, you are humbled.

Tinted Distances is a tender meditation that reveals a careful eye and steady devotion to elegy and ode.