Kizer Quotes & Sayings

In some ways painters have been more important in my life than writers. Painters teach you how to see - a faculty that usually isn't highly developed in poets. Whether you take a walk in the woods with a painter, or go to a museum with one, through them you notice shapes, colors, harmonies, relationships that enhance your own seeing. — Carolyn Kizer

Love conquers nothing. Love provides the motivation; the person must do the rest with their own hands, heart, and feet. — Amber Kizer

Love is the greatest act of faith. — Amber Kizer

I discovered it was easier to carry around a pen than a piano. — Carolyn Kizer

I used to get so many letters from students about the ending of 'Pro Femina.' So I had a stamp made that said 'irony, irony, irony' to put on a postcard and mail it back. — Carolyn Kizer

Be the cockroach — Amber Kizer

Her fingers were gnarled and crooked like the roots of the oldest swamp trees. Not prissy roots of trees that grew in manicured parks and didn't understand the mess of life. These were roots forced to grow around, and down, and through, to survive. — Amber Kizer

She tended to be impatient with that sort of intellectual who, for all his brilliance, has never been able to arrive at the simple conclusion that to be reasonably happy you have to be reasonably good. — Carolyn Kizer

I wrote poetry off and on in high school, when I could manage to get out of gym classes and sports - using my allergies as an excuse - and climb the hill behind school till I found a nice place to settle down with a notebook and look at Spokane spread out below. — Carolyn Kizer

As I remember, the first real poem I wrote was about the wheat fields between Spokane and Pullman, to the south. — Carolyn Kizer

I'm eclipsed by my role in the world — Amber Kizer

No matter how brief an encounter you have with anybody, you both change. — Carolyn Kizer

Everything changes. Everything is temporary, except for the sky. When you find yourself caught up in the horrors or heroes of a lifetime, look up. Don't look down. That which is beneath our feet is liquid, but the sky, the sky is solid, constant, ever ready and ever hopeful that the sun will rise in the morning and the moon will rise at night. They don't really set, you know. They're always rising, just rising for someone else. — Amber Kizer

It's hard to take sex ed seriously when the teachers haven't even wiggled their stuff in this millennium. — Amber Kizer

I began writing poems when I was about eight, with a heavy assist from my mother. She read me Arthur Waley's translations and Whitman and Robinson Jeffers, who have been lifelong influences on me. My father read Keats to me, and then he read more Keats while I was lying on the sofa struggling with asthma. — Carolyn Kizer

Death is what makes life possible. It's the balance, Meridian. There always has to be balance. — Amber Kizer

If you live long enough, you learn time is an illusion created by men who fear death. The clocks and watches worshipped by those who deny the inevitable. There is power in acknowledging we are not the ones in control. — Amber Kizer

What is it? Tens, I can see the stick up your arse from here. I'm dying remember? Dying people don't have time for silly moods — Amber Kizer

I pushed back my chair and leaned against the table, then swung back to Tens. 'And if you're not nicer to me I'll just wiggle my eyebrows or purse my lips or whatever the hell I do to kill everything around me and then you'll be dead. And then we'll see who gets the last laugh. — Amber Kizer

Poets are interested primarily in death and commas. — Carolyn Kizer

He said, "You have pigs in this poem; pigs are not poetic." I got up and walked out of that class and never went back. — Carolyn Kizer

You cannot meet someone for a moment, or even cast eyes on someone in the street, without changing. That is my subject. — Carolyn Kizer

I was raised to be a girl Michelangelo. — Carolyn Kizer

You're not from around here, are you? Can't be. Why would we name it I-YOU-POO-Y? Really? Say the letters. I-U-P-U-I. — Amber Kizer

I've been enormously fortunate. People say, 'How do you feel about your reputation?' My real belief is that I have exactly the reputation I deserve ... on the whole, I feel comfortable with myself. — Carolyn Kizer

Smoked sausage and a jolly tupping. Ale and folly. Fickle bosoms and bar fights. That is the sum of experiences my souls gathered from their lives. Why do I attract all the unsophisticated fancy men? For once could one love the opera and his mother?
- Lucinda Myer, b. 1702-d. 1808 — Amber Kizer

I didn't learn much about writing at Sarah Lawrence, but I learned a lot about the sources of poems - dreams, myth, history - from the really great teachers, Joseph Campbell, Charles Trinkhaus, Bert Loewenberg, and a young Australian anthropologist named Harry Hawthorne. — Carolyn Kizer

Environmental concerns and feminism are locked together. Generally, women have closer connections to the organic nature of our lives. — Carolyn Kizer

I tell people I never got to hear Dylan Thomas read because my husband wouldn't let me, because he thought it would be a sort of bad influence. People say, 'And you didn't go?' They're so surprised because the me they know would have gone. And I say I was very much a 'yes, dear' wife. — Carolyn Kizer

What is so marvelous about living today is that it is possible to extend, like a flower, spreading petals in all directions. — Carolyn Kizer

History teaches us things about ourselves, but you have to listen for the lessons. You have to be really still to hear the whispers. — Amber Kizer

Poems, to me, do not come from ideas, they come from a series of images that you tuck away in the back of your brain. Little photographic snapshots. Then you get the major vision of the poem, which is like a giant magnet to which all these disparate little impressions fly and adhere, and there is the poem! — Carolyn Kizer

We live in wonder, blaze in a cycle of passion and apprehension. — Carolyn Kizer

Our masks, always in peril of smearing or cracking,
In need of continuous check in the mirror or silverware,
Keep us in thrall to ourselves, concerned with our surfaces.
[ ... ]
So primp, preen, prink, pluck, and prize your flesh,
All posturings! All ravishment! All sensibility!
Meanwhile, have you used your mind today? — Carolyn Kizer

You write for the people in high school who ignored you. We all do. — Carolyn Kizer

A poet, to whom no one cruel and imposing listens, / Disdained by senates, whispers to your dust, — Carolyn Kizer

I happen to believe that there are a lot of good poets around at present, but a poet like Alex Kuo, who possesses a highly developed moral sense and a bitter honesty, is rare at any time and especially in this time. We need him. — Carolyn Kizer

What good is a quilt if it's unused? The same as a life unused. They're meant to be wrung out and frayed around the edges. That's the way of things. Always has been. Always will be. — Amber Kizer

Poets are interested mostly in death and commas. — Carolyn Kizer