Quotes from Eileen Myles

If passion was a substance I would say it is dark brown, and then blood red. It's like wet grass, tons of it soaked in mud. It's warm and it stinks like shit and it's unaccountably and endlessly good. It's thick and it goes on for miles and it isn't so much deep as bottomless and it holds you in its grip, you never drown. And then it goes. That's all you know.

I am always hungry and wanting to have sex. This is a fact.

I hope you all find yourself sleeping with someone you love, maybe not all of the time, but a lot of the time. The touch of a foot in the night is sincere. I hope you like your work, I hope there's mystery and poetry in your life, not even poems, but patterns. I hope you can see them. Often these patterns will wake you up, and you will know that you are alive, again and again.

Sometimes in utter hopelessness I put my cheek on the table like it was someone. I wanted to wake my brain up and be loved.

Time passes. That's for sure.

If the end of one's youth is a thin slice of cheese I ate mine standing in that room. I was there because I was hungry. That's all.

All the details of my life were in exact order and yet I was tumbling in them-out of order like a tremendous wave had hit me and I was thrown off the ship and I awoke or dreaming, or dead I knew not-no I couldn't speak.

If there is something I will always carry in my heart it is this earnest unwillingness to be part of the bunch

The bag I wanted was beyond reason - something to hold my poems, twice as big as the universe and it must be androgynous.

What happened was private. I was in it with Rose. She had hurt me grievously and now I was forever attached. I was in it now with all the women in the world. I walked home glad. I will die, I thought with a bounce in my step. I'm whole. Not whole like anyone else, but whole like me. Painful, but simple. It was very simple now.

But if I paid attention, really paid attention maybe I could ignore the mountain of sadness and she might entertain and distract me and I would think this is life. The romance and the sadness. I am in it now. I did do that which is what happened.

The poet's life is just so much crenellated waste, nights and days whipping swiftly or laboriously past the cinematic window. We're hunched and weaving over the keys of our green our grey or pink blue manual typewriter maybe a darker stone cold thoritative selectric with its orgasmic expectant hum and us popping pills and laughing over what you or I just wrote, wondering if that line means insult or sex. Or both. Usually both.

And how are your teeth tonight? Can you afford to fix them?

What I started to understand was that the poem was made out of time–past, present and future. It lives in the present, it breathes there and that's how you let anyone in. I think people can feel this accessing of time in poetry very readily. As soon as the poem ceases to be about anything, when it even stops saving things, stops being such a damn collector, it becomes an invite to the only refuge which is the impossible moment of being alive.

I still feel like the world is a piece of bread, I'm holding out half to you

Nope, I am destroyed. A shattered boat of a person. A broken window here, a lousy bell there. An old crappy dyke with half a brain leaking into a book. A drippy excrescence. A schmear.

You know how you're always half hungry while in bed. Well this was like sleeping with a meal, a big fried meal, you have your arms around it.

Interviews Ntozake Shange) "What do you think an artist's job is?" "To keep our sensibilities alive, so we aren't numb by our struggles to survive. That's what I think our job is right now.

If boys were always trying to get in girls' pants, what did they want? What could the girls give them? Pee it seemed to me was an appropriate gift.

Because rich people need poor friends (but not too poor!) to maintain their connection to the struggle that spawned them even if they never struggled. Poor people tend to know what's going on plus they are often good-looking, at least when they are young and even later they are the cool interesting people the rich person once slept with, so the poor person always feathers the nests of the rich.

The room was the poem, the day I was in. Oh Christ. What writes my poem is the second ring, inner or outer. Poetry is just the performance of it. These little things, whether I write them or not. That's the score. The thing of great value is you. Where you are, glowing and fading, while you live.

The best thing you can do for a writer is give them a bad review.

In the month of December I couldn't get out of bed. I kept waking up at 6 P.M. and it was Christmas or New Year's and I had to start drinking & eating.

already I know it will hurt this is the hurt country