Alison Hawthorne Deming famous quotes

I don't know much about death and the sorriest lesson I've learned is that words, my most trusted guardians against chaos, offer small comfort in the face of anyone's dying.
-- Alison Hawthorne Deming

#Dying #Comfort #Lessons

I've been accused of darkness by my inner light.
-- Alison Hawthorne Deming

#Light #Darkness #Inner Light

It's extremely important that, as writers, we give a voice to those who don't have voices, including the other animals that we share the planet with and the places that are endangered or being lost.
-- Alison Hawthorne Deming

#Animal #Voice #Giving

We're facing enormous changes in our planetary life, with climate change and the adaptations that all natural systems are going to have to make to these climate changes, and so it's extremely important to bear witness to what's happening.
-- Alison Hawthorne Deming

#Important #Climate #Bears

We're nature. Our minds are nature. Our desire to make poetry is nature.
-- Alison Hawthorne Deming

#Mind #Desire #Poetry Is

Earth's immune system - its rapid response team of self-protection - becomes invigorated at times of peril. And one sees it at play now in the upwelling of grassroots work aimed at finding a sustainable future.
-- Alison Hawthorne Deming

#Team #Self #Play

The world is going to be less biologically rich for quite some time in the future. We are always weeping that we live in such a diminished world, but we are experiencing a biologically rich world compared to what the future will look like. Bearing witness to that is a beautiful gift.
-- Alison Hawthorne Deming

#Beautiful #Looks #World

I'm extremely interested in science as the mythos within which I live. Science tells me what kind of animal I am, what kind of a universe I live in. It's always deepening my understanding of the natural world.
-- Alison Hawthorne Deming

#Animal #Understanding #World

I'm always trying to ask myself both "Who am I as an individual?" and "What are the cultural forces that have made me the person that I am?" How can I understand myself as a cultural creature as well as an individual? I'm really obsessed with that question, and always asking my students to consider it.
-- Alison Hawthorne Deming

#Always Trying #Asking #Students

A lot of times students will come up to me and say, "Well, I can't write because I don't know what I think about such-and-such." And I say, "That's why you have to write." You don't wait until you know, because then who cares - it's static.
-- Alison Hawthorne Deming

#Writing #Thinking #Waiting

There are landscapes and species that are not going to be here a hundred years from now, fifty years from now. One gift we as writers give to the world is to bear witness to these landscapes and species as we have experienced them.
-- Alison Hawthorne Deming

#Years #Giving #World

If you have this deep feeling of empathy for the natural world, you feel it so profoundly. It's almost a religious experience. I feel that I could never really say the depth of feeling or connection I feel to the natural world, which has made me.
-- Alison Hawthorne Deming

#Religious #Empathy #Feelings

I had real concerns about the relationship between nature and culture and places I wanted to write about... I thought, well, maybe I should try prose. It was a real struggle to begin because, first of all, there were so many words on the page - it was terrifying... Beginning was awful.
-- Alison Hawthorne Deming

#Real #Struggle #Writing

Once you realize that human actions affect every bit of earth and sky, you realize that the environment isn't just what surrounds us - it's all one whole.
-- Alison Hawthorne Deming

#Sky #Earth #Action

You see this incredible capacity for replication in nature, survival, development, all of these things that are around us all the time in nature that just happen. By comparison, human life is really, really complicated. We're gifted animals, but we are so complicated. Nothing is easy for us, except maybe eating too much.
-- Alison Hawthorne Deming

#Animal #Survival #Development

I am a result of what has happened on this planet - how could I find the art to say that? I can't, and yet, I am drawn to it because of the enormity of it. That seems really important.
-- Alison Hawthorne Deming

#Art #Important #Results

I'm really interested in culture because it is such a powerful human force, particularly in America where we think it's all about the individual.
-- Alison Hawthorne Deming

#Powerful #Thinking #America

Bringing science into poetry is one way of acknowledging some of the richest stuff that is in my cultural moment.
-- Alison Hawthorne Deming

#Stuff #Way #Moments

I'm always doing poems from a place of not-knowing, a place of ignorance in a way.
-- Alison Hawthorne Deming

#Ignorance #Knowing #Not Knowing

For the poets, my hope is that they will, quite simply, feel the obligation to be really informed about the situation in which we find ourselves, in terms of our imperiled planet. You should inform yourself so deeply that it becomes part of your nature, part of your voice.
-- Alison Hawthorne Deming

#Voice #Poet #Should

I had wanted for so many years to feel that writing really was at the center of my life, not something I did in my spare time. So the writing and teaching feel in some way to be one thing - the personal engagement and the social engagement good partners.
-- Alison Hawthorne Deming

#Teaching #Writing #Years

The environment is becoming so much a central concern, I see environmental concerns just bleeding into poetries all over the place. My hope is that we won't have these environmental poets tucked over here and everybody else doing cool stuff with language and consciousness elsewhere, but that all of it will become one thing.
-- Alison Hawthorne Deming

#Environmental #Stuff #Bleeding

Climate change is a moral challenge, not simply an economic or technological problem. It is linked to social justice, because it is the poor citizens of the world who will suffer the most from our excesses.
-- Alison Hawthorne Deming

#Justice #Challenges #Suffering

As deaths have accumulated I have begun to think of life and death as a set of balance scales. When one is young, the scale is heavily tipped toward the living. With the first death, the first consciousness of death, the counter scale begins to fall. Death by death, the scales shift weight until what was unthinkable becomes merely a matter of gravity and the fall into death becomes an easy step.
-- Alison Hawthorne Deming

#Death #Fall #Thinking