Diane di Prima famous quotes

03-25-2025

I think the poet is the last person who is still speaking the truth when no one else dares to. I think the poet is the first person to begin the shaping and visioning of the new forms and the new consciousness when no one else has begun to sense it; I think these are two of the most essential human functions.
-- Diane di Prima

#Thinking #Two #Essentials
In the fiftiesâ€¦ we were so busy being cool that we didnâ€™t know how to say the word love
-- Diane di Prima

#Busy #Being Cool
The only war is the war against the imagination.
-- Diane di Prima

#War #Imagination
It is still news to her that passion could steer her wrong though she went down, a thousand times strung out across railroad tracks, off bridges under cars, or stiff glass bottle still in hand, hair soft on greasy pillows, still it is news she cannot follow love (his burning footsteps in blue crystal snow) & still come out all right.
-- Diane di Prima

#Passion #Hands #Bridges
More or Less Love Poems #11: No babe We'd never Swing together but the syncopation would be something wild
-- Diane di Prima

#Swings #Together #Would Be
I have just realized that the stakes are myself I have no other ransom money, nothing to break or barter but my life
-- Diane di Prima

#Ransom #Break #Stakes
Sweetheart, when you break thru you'll find a poet here, not quite what one would choose.
-- Diane di Prima

#Sweetheart #Poet #Break
Maketa Groves has a strong, bright lyric gift. Her poems come out of music and are full of music. They bring us the sounds of the streets and the sounds of nature, and make us see once again that they are parts of the same song. She celebrates American lives as they are lived today: the mother scrubbing her kitchen floor at midnight, the drag-queens in the Tenderloin, the homeless woman knitting in the courtyard. This is poetry that relentlessly shows us the beauty in the world, with all its struggles and complexity, and demands that we go out to meet it with open hearts.
-- Diane di Prima

#Mother #Song #Strong
In the fifties… we were so busy being cool that we didn’t know how to say the word love
-- Diane di Prima

#Busy #Being Cool #Words Love

A quotation is a handy thing to have about, saving one the trouble of thinking for oneself, always a laborious business.
Our God has boundless resources. The only limit is in us. Our asking, our thinking, our praying are too small. Our expectations are too limited.
My goal has been to encourage jointness, to push people to think of affiliations rather than to operate as solo entrepreneurs.
I think I feel rather differently about sympathy to what seems the normal view. I like just to feel it is there, but not always expressed.
Eagleton has spent his life inside two mental boxes, Catholicism and Marxism, of both of which he is a severe internal criticâ€”that is, he frequently kicks and scratches at the inside of the boxes, but does not leave them. Neither are ideologies that loosen their grip easily, and people who need the security of adherence to a big dominating ideology, however much they kick and scratch but without daring to leave go, hold on to it every bit as tightly as it holds onto them. The result is of course strangulation, but alas not mutual strangulation: the ideology always wins.
There are two types of people in the world, and I'm one of them.
If a literary man puts together two words about music, one of them will be wrong.
I think there are two ways to depict a family. One is what it's really like, and one is what the audience would like it to be. Between you and me, I think the second one is what I would prefer.
No psychological health is possible unless this essential care of the person is fundamentally accepted, loved and respected by others and by himself.
The urge to revolt is one of the essential dimensions of human nature.

Diane di Prima famous quotes

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