Quotes from Marilyn Hacker

Did you love well what you very soon left? Come home and take me in your arms and take away this stomach ache, headache, heartache.

You happened to me. You were as deep down as I've ever been. You were inside me like my pulse.

Sweetheart, it isn't lust; it's all the rest of what I want with you that scares me shitless.

i'm alternatingly brilliant and witless-and sleepless: bed is just a swamp to roll in.

There are lines of yours I know by heart. There are scents of yours soaked in my skin.

Who gets to choose what battle takes her down?

I don't know if you have the words I need. I know you didn't need the ones I had.

When I was in love with her, with a lover's tendency to mythify the beloved did I know her better than I do now, when we know our limits? Now

imagine that it were given back to me to be the child who knew departure would be sweet, the boy who drew square-rigged ships, the girl who knew truck routes from ottawa to mexico, the me who found a door in latin verse and made a map out of hexameters.

There is no danger greater for the State than that of self-styled intellectuals. You would have been better off remaining illiterate. - King Hassan II of Morocco, quoted in the Preface

What your mother left undone, women who are not your mother may do. Women who are not your lover love you.