69 Quotes by Marilyn Hacker

You happened to me. You were as deep down as I’ve ever been. You were inside me like my pulse.

What your mother left undone, women who are not your mother may do. Women who are not your lover love you.

The pull between sound and syntax creates a kind of musical tension in the language that interests me.

The ambiguities of language, both in terms of vocabulary and syntax, are fascinating: how important connotation is, what is lost and what is gained in the linguistic transition.

You are almost not free, if you are teaching a group of graduate students, to become friends with one of them. I don't mean anything erotically charged, just a friendship.

As a teacher you are more or less obliged to pay the same amount of attention to everything. That can wear you down.

Good writing gives energy, whatever it is about.

The woman poet must be either a sexless, reclusive eccentric, with nothing to say specifically to women, or a brilliant, tragic, tortured suicide.

Translation is an interestingly different way to be involved both with poetry and with the language that I've found myself living in much of the time. I think the two feed each other.