Quotes from Alice Notley

You used to be alive, now you're almost mythic.

I'm the one who has no small feelings

I want to go back to where I once lived, but it isn't there anymore; that one of me isn't here.

Feeling awful is physiological you say. God I hate you, I say. Yes you can find the neurons for feeling awful. Do you think you can find the neurons for the fact I hate you?

I wanted him to love me, but then that wasn't enough.

I went to a place like another planet where I felt good without wanting something.

cry out with me turn on the lights

Come apart in my mouth.

when someone reads poems I exist to be the one who's feeling it.

I'm alive and dead now, at the same time, speaking in your poems.

You're too lazy, passive to suffer. I do that for you too.

We hate the ones who are spontaneously different, as if what they loved accused us of unhappiness.

We could never sit at this kitchen table without our terrible and beautiful past and our poems that tell us who we are.

Are you in pain, my darling? There's no pain here but the psychic; you're afloat in a blood-sticky unuttered scream.

We know ourselves in the extinguishable light, but we know ourselves in another universe

I seem to love you, though I never see you.

I have just transcended my epoch; I am alive outside written memory.

You entered this hall in your moonlit unconsciousness pleading for a different life.

why can't I just live? Why can't I just live?

Another way to say it: we are each the whole thing, and I merge with you when I wish.

I'm fated, and I'm entirely yours.

I did not do those things; I only watched, watched myself act, react.

I couldn't sleep in my dream.

I am standing somewhere underground, in an underworld, with all the others. I never wanted this.