93 Quotes by Eileen Myles

"You know how you’re always half hungry while in bed. Well this was like sleeping with a meal, a big fried meal, you have your arms around it."

"I always think of childhood as the inarticulate moment, and you have your little camera. You were filming it, recording it, you just didn’t know how to speak it."

"The room was the poem, the day I was in. Oh Christ. What writes my poem is the second ring, inner or outer. Poetry is just the performance of it. These little things, whether I write them or not. That’s the score. The thing of great value is you. Where you are, glowing and fading, while you live."

"I was a working-class kid from Boston. But I never lost my accent because I felt like that was what I was doing. I didn’t have to perform Woody Guthrie like Bob Dylan did in the ’60s, I just had to make myself be Eileen Myles and let that be my shield."

"Nope, I am destroyed. A shattered boat of a person. A broken window here, a lousy bell there. An old crappy dyke with half a brain leaking into a book. A drippy excrescence. A schmear."

"I wonder, would I have transitioned from female to male if I was 30 years younger? Possibly. But if I had been born even 30 years later, because it seems like the technology will only get better, it seems like one might not ever need to settle down at all."

"But if I paid attention, really paid attention maybe I could ignore the mountain of sadness and she might entertain and distract me and I would think this is life. The romance and the sadness. I am in it now. I did do that which is what happened."

"Lucifer’s name means light and the reason they threw him out of heaven and he became the biggest devil and not the biggest saint anymore was what he did with language."

"Poetry is my politics. It’s an opportunity that gives me a way to speak."

"The best thing you can do for a writer is give them a bad review."