29 Quotes by Stephen Dobyns

One writes a poem when one is so taken up by an emotional concept that one is unable to remain silent.

These people you used to see every day, friends or acquaintances, after a while they become as distant as any stranger, people you suddenly recall late at night--you remember something they said or something silly that someone once did. For a few moments they completely occupy your mind; then you forget them again.

Most women are more into real estate than sex. They want to own you.

The obsession was gone. We liked each other, even loved each other. And our sex was still good, but the hunger was gone. Either it just wore out or we wore each other out. A passion like that pushes everything else out of its path. You can't be married and have jobs and children and work and write and have something like an emotional bubonic plague.

If it weren't for the Chicagos and Detroits and Toledos, the terrible things would spread out across the whole country and make trouble for everybody else. Such places were collectors of badness in the way hospitals were collectors of the sick and damaged.

It was as if pain were a room he had entered and the door had been locked behind him.

Trying to remember youis like carrying waterin my hands a long distanceacross sand. Somewhere people are waiting.They have drunk nothing for days.

I am someone who has spent his adult life on the periphery of literature in the way that a small animal will remain just beyond the glow of the campfire, observing the strange doings of the human creatures settling in for the night.

For years I had been living in a kind of eternal present, shutting off all the past which disagreed with me, letting through only the most censored memories. As for the future, nothing was thought out. It simply happened, like the turning of the page. In filling my life with books, I was ... surrounding myself with other people's stories in order to obliterate my own.