Quotes from Fanny Howe

My novels are about a generation of Americans who lived between 1940 and 2000, who resisted the postwar political and cultural forces by choosing a wandering life of impoverishment and wonder. Inevitably, race and economics are a big part of their stories. Childhood, childishness, and children are never far.

If this world isn't good enough for us then an afterlife won't be enough.

If someone is alone reading my poems, I hope it would be like reading someone's notebook. A record. Of a place, beauty, difficulty. A familiar daily struggle.

I grew up reading 19th-century novels and late Victorian children's books, so I try for a good story full of coincidence and error, landscape and weather. However, the world was radically changed during my lifetime, and I tell of that battering as best I can.

Why does a heart wear its eyes into hell like slivers of false sunshine

The wildness of the flower is all in the tone

The ring comes whenever it will because it's dark where the mountains mother and being stuck in one spot is something to ring bells about

I can't rescue what never happened though I came here to do so.

There is no longer any class outside the class of character, and no history to put your faith in. You can actually live as if you have no culture, no perspective particular to a date in time. You are an individual whose prime and solitary property is your own body. Dying becomes a hell beyond all reason or justice in this ahistorical context.

We have often had this particular exchange about climate and landscape and why we both feel so lonely here uprooted. It was what each of us had wanted of course. Besides wanting to experience a place we hated, we wanted to be insomniacs and loners, losers and drop-outs. To know the sky was the only location of meaning and joy left to us.

Since love came over and knocked me down, Then kicked me in the side and fled, I have suffered from a prolonged perplexity. God is the object of my wonder and the closest to me. Especially near sleep. My sheets are like the wings of a guardian angel. There is no other fabric so near to my feelings.

According to a Kabbalistic rabbi, in the Messianic age people will no longer quarrel with others but only with themselves.

Sometimes I think prostitution and slavery may be the actual subjects of all fiction because of the way fiction exploits its characters.)

Usually plot is to fiction what form is to poetry. It lifts and fills the rambling language and presses it down into a single shape and sound. (85)

Walk to developmental old trombone- I - seeking to be found- inside time!- by one whose blues seek by speaking tunes to this specific city afternoon of bread, fumes, and orange nasturtiums- am, still, solo- even the base of me being, unknown.

I traveled to the page where scripture meets fiction. The paper slept but the night in me woke up. Black letters were now alive and collectible in a material crawl. I could not decipher their intentions anymore. To what end did their shapes come forth? To seduce or speak truth?

Angels die? It's a frightening-miracle because here they are. The Upper God has let them drop like centuries into space. And I recognize them!

The point of art is to show people that life is worth living by showing that it isn't

Philosophy should only be written as poetry.

First you might cry. Because shame and loneliness are almost one. Shame at existing in the first place. Shame at being visible, taking up space, breathing some of the sky, sleeping in a whole bed, asking for a share. Loneliness feels so much like shame, it always seems to need a little more time on its own.

A signal does not necessarily mean that you want to be located or described. It can mean that you want to be known as Unlocatable and Hidden.

A body's interior is a serpent studded with corruption. From the will of each person-to secret egos- she sees a net, dot-to-dot, interconnected, with persons bent over it, laborious, intent, the whole world working together on one collective project. When your mouth remembers a bit of bread left on a plate and leads you back to finish it, you are having the experience- close to the surface- by which you usually live.

I was hungry for love It was pathetic the stones I threw or smashed my mouth on in my pathology of starvation

In poetry, I have, since very young, loved poetry in translation. The Chinese, the French, the Russians, Italians, Indians and early Celts: the formality of the translator's voice, their measured breath and anxiety moves me as it lingers over the original.