Eileen Myles Quotes

17 Sourced Quotes

Beautiful,
a cloud
like a crown

wet trees

as we drove
into the city

Eileen Myles
My writing has made me a redundant human being.

Eileen Myles
There are so many struggles and so many obstacles and also, like, so many solutions. And mostly, it seems you've got to keep being kind of playful about what a poet is, what a writer is, what a culture is, what ... what ambition is.

Eileen Myles
In New York if you wanted to connect with the art world, it seemed the only way to do it was to write about people.

Eileen Myles
The tree
smells like
a lollipop
a dog barks
like a
bell. The
dog drinks
the tree's
water.

Eileen Myles
It seems to me I am always preparing for a beautiful death. Avoid all short-cuts. Dress the way you like. Always check the train schedule in advance. Pay your own way. Apologize for what you did, not what you didn't do. Don't be mad at the guitar player in the subway. Don't wait too long. Patience is relative. Read the paper. Keep throwing things out. Keep your life light and spacious. Expect to feel different. You might need a camera. There are puddles and angles you'll never want to forget. If you get scared, count. The dream you're seeing out the window might be death. I think God is death. I really do.

Eileen Myles
I love paintings because I didn't have to paint them. The great ones seem painted by no one. Did they choose to awaken behind the brush, in a flurry of pigment and vision.

Eileen Myles
And dawn, a dawn,
that's unrecognizable.
It's there I finally
stopped in your
midnight arms.

Eileen Myles
My dreams of you are always softer than you are. My dreams must need a goddess and it seems she has your face. And so you may stay a while in my heart.

Eileen Myles
Listen, I have been educated.
I have learned about Western
Civilization. Do you know
What the message of Western
Civilization is? I am alone.

Eileen Myles
There's nothing more ambitious than a young poet. You feel omnipotent. You're on the upswing of bipolar. And that enrages older poets—which, to a certain sensibility, only makes you want to be more vapid and fame obsessed and glib. No one can tell you what the limits are. As it should be. No one's got the keys to the kingdom.

Eileen Myles
The most exciting thing is to read a poem out loud for the first time. There's a whole kind of inside thing bursting out, and I'm always dying to hear it. I do hear it in my head, but I never read it out loud to myself until I'm in front of people.

Eileen Myles
When I'm writing the poem, I feel like I have to close my eyes. I don't mean literally, but you invite a kind of blindness and that's the birth of the poem. Writing is all performance. Something's passing through.

Eileen Myles
When somebody's in love with you, they think it's amazing you've written them a poem, and when they don't love you anymore, they hate those poems. They wish those poems would go away.

Eileen Myles
What's fictional is arrangement—what follows what. If somebody is lying to you, part of what they're doing is hiding things, omitting stuff, changing the order of things. And that's fiction.

Eileen Myles
I was like the family clown. The middle child entertaining. I was a lousy student, but interestingly the nuns always let me write plays or do drawings, endless special projects. I made art when I was a kid so I wouldn't fail in school.

Eileen Myles
I guess I don't worry about my poems so much. I worry about me.

Eileen Myles