Quotes by Marilyn Hacker

From Orient PointThe art of living isnt hard to muster:Enjoy the hour, not what it might portend.When someone makes you promises, dont trust herunless theyre in the here and now, and just herwilling largesse free-handed to a friend.The art of living isnt hard to muster:groom the old dog, her coat gets back its luster;take brisk walks so youre hungry at the end.When someone makes you promises, dont trust herto know she can afford what they will cost herto keep until theyre kept. Till then, pretendthe art of living isnt hard to muster.Cooking, eating and drinking are a clusterof pleasures. Next time, dont go round the bendwhen someone makes you promises. Dont trust herpast where youd trust yourself, and dont adjust herwords to mean more to you than shed intend.The art of living isnt hard to muster.You never had her, so you havent lost herlike spare house keys. Whatever she opens,when someone makes you promises, dont. Trust yourart; go on living: thats not hard to muster.

My mother was told she couldnt go to medical school because she was a woman and a Jew. So she became a teacher in the New York City public school system.

As a teacher you are more or less obliged to pay the same amount of attention to everything. That can wear you down.

Of the individual poems, some are more lyric and some are more descriptive or narrative. Each poem is fixed in a moment. All those moments written or read together take on the movement and architecture of a narrative.

I started to send my work to journals when I was 26, which was just a question of when I got the courage up. They were mostly journals I had been reading for the previous six or seven years.

You are almost not free, if you are teaching a group of graduate students, to become friends with one of them. I dont mean anything erotically charged, just a friendship.

Everyone thinks theyre going to write one book of poems or one novel.