93 Quotes by Eileen Myles

"People love discovering you. The thing about not being historically a mainstream writer is that everyone feels like you’re theirs, you’re their friend."

"I hope you all find yourself sleeping with someone you love, maybe not all of the time, but a lot of the time. The touch of a foot in the night is sincere. I hope you like your work, I hope there’s mystery and poetry in your life, not even poems, but patterns. I hope you can see them. Often these patterns will wake you up, and you will know that you are alive, again and again."

"I really just love reading. It’s my favorite thing, performing my poems live."

"I’m a poet born in the era of Andy Warhol and a generation that wanted to be famous."

"I still feel like the world is a piece of bread, I’m holding out half to you."

"The poet is like the wise fool or like a version of the stand-up, because we’re standing, we’re doing stand-up. That’s exactly what we’re doing."

"The bag I wanted was beyond reason – something to hold my poems, twice as big as the universe and it must be androgynous."

"Women aren’t physically afraid of men; women are genetically afraid of men. It’s happened for such a long time."

"If the end of one’s youth is a thin slice of cheese I ate mine standing in that room. I was there because I was hungry. That’s all."

"What I started to understand was that the poem was made out of time–past, present and future. It lives in the present, it breathes there and that’s how you let anyone in. I think people can feel this accessing of time in poetry very readily. As soon as the poem ceases to be about anything, when it even stops saving things, stops being such a damn collector, it becomes an invite to the only refuge which is the impossible moment of being alive."