Fanny Howe Quotes & Sayings

I grew up reading 19th-century novels and late Victorian children's books, so I try for a good story full of coincidence and error, landscape and weather. However, the world was radically changed during my lifetime, and I tell of that battering as best I can. — Fanny Howe

In poetry, I have, since very young, loved poetry in translation. The Chinese, the French, the Russians, Italians, Indians and early Celts: the formality of the translator's voice, their measured breath and anxiety moves me as it lingers over the original. — Fanny Howe

Why does a heart wear its eyes
into hell
like slivers of false sunshine — Fanny Howe

We have often had this particular exchange about climate and landscape and why we both feel so lonely here uprooted. It was what each of us had wanted of course.Besides wanting to experience a place we hated, we wanted to be insomniacs and loners, losers and drop-outs. To know the sky was the only location of meaning and joy left to us. — Fanny Howe

My novels are about a generation of Americans who lived between 1940 and 2000, who resisted the postwar political and cultural forces by choosing a wandering life of impoverishment and wonder. Inevitably, race and economics are a big part of their stories. Childhood, childishness, and children are never far. — Fanny Howe

I was a go-go dancer at the Dom on East 10th Street in NYC. This was a glittering ballroom over Stanley's Bar. 1965. — Fanny Howe

If someone is alone reading my poems, I hope it would be like reading someone's notebook. A record. Of a place, beauty, difficulty. A familiar daily struggle. — Fanny Howe

If this world isn't good enough for us then an afterlife won't be enough ... — Fanny Howe

Doubt is what allows a single gesture to have a heart. — Fanny Howe

The ring comes whenever it will
because it's dark
where the mountains mother
and being stuck in one spot
is something to ring bells about — Fanny Howe