Daphne Gottlieb Quotes & Sayings

“I think that I have less conviction than ever that poetry matters - that poetry changes or saves anything or anyone. But, in fact, that's tremendously freeing. If it doesn't matter much, the stakes are lower and you can't really fail. It's insurrection. It's a tiny alphabet revolution. A secret. A psalm.”

“I think that hope is the act of continuing in the face of the truth.”

“Poetry is a lousy form of activism; it doesn't really change much. And maybe we can point to one or two historical times when a poem has started a revolution or a rebellion or an uprising, but it doesn't happen that often, and if you put the number of poems next to the number of political acts, it would be pretty slim.”

“I go in and out of season. I won't write for months, and then all of a sudden, I'll write like I've got a fever.”

“I go through periods of not writing. Until there's something I can't find in the world that I need, so I write.”

“I write to make sense of things that don't make sense to me.”

“Love - at least the pair-bonded, prescribed love - does not conquer all.”

“That's point of writing: building what you need, right?”

“I was 14 and madly in love for the first time. He was 21. He made me suddenly, unaccustomedly beautiful with his kisses and mix tapes. During the year of elation and longing, he never mentioned that he had a girlfriend who lived across the street.”

“I'm entranced by the idea of reading the culture back to itself, because I'm conscious that we as people and also as a culture are myth-making machines. So I'm interested in a resistance to that: What we can bend, what we can break.”