Diane Wakoski Quotes

13 Sourced Quotes

Poems reveal secrets when they are analyzed. The poet's pleasure in finding ingenious ways to enclose her secrets should be matched by the reader's pleasure in unlocking and revealing these secrets.

Diane Wakoski
My trouble
is that I have the spirit of Gertrude Stein
but the personality of Alice B. Toklas.

Diane Wakoski
This book is dedicated to all those men who betrayed me at one time or another, in hopes they will fall off their motorcycles and break their necks.

Diane Wakoski
I am the rock.
The hard rock.
You can't break me.

Diane Wakoski
Poetry is one of the essential structures of civilization — carrying myth, ritual, 'tales of the tribe' and the essence of language.

Diane Wakoski
Innocence is suffering
and the loss of that innocence
is something to fear.

Diane Wakoski
Justice is
reason enough for anything ugly. It balances the beauty in the world.

Diane Wakoski
And I have not learned happily
to live with my face.

Diane Wakoski
There are rituals not structures for being a poet, drinking too much, taking too many drugs, being a lady chaser, having your nervous breakdown, being irresponsible about money.

Diane Wakoski
We are authors, all of us, concerned with beginning, with making, with sources and substance.

Diane Wakoski
Learning to live with what you're born with
is the process,
the involvement,
the making of a life.

Diane Wakoski
I write in the first person because I have always wanted to make my life more interesting than it was.

Diane Wakoski
The best young writers are convinced they need blurbs from famous writers before an editor will even read the first page of a manuscript. If this is true, then the editorial system that prevails today stinks. And let's start reforming it.

Diane Wakoski