Marilyn Quotes

My mother was told she couldn't 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.

Watching movies is my one distraction.

I haven't looked at marriage in the conventional sense, as far as settling down. I look at it as putting faith in another person, which has always been hard for me to do.

Marriage destroyed my relationship with two wonderful men.

The 'public' scares me, but people I trust.

I can't satisfy myself with just trying to tie all of my imagination into music, especially when music is not appreciated as an art form as much as it used to be.

Art gives people a reason to be alive.

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

Everyone thinks they're going to write one book of poems or one novel.

As far as I'm concerned, the happiest time of my life is now. There's a future and I can't wait to get to it.

I’m a dancer who cannot dance.

I used to say to myself, 'What the devil have you got to be proud about, Marilyn Monroe?' And I'd answer, 'Everything, everything.'

The Lord instructs me not to judge any man.

My body is my body, every part of it.

The least I can give them is the best they can get from me. What's the good of drawing in the next breath if all you do is let it out and draw in another?

The facts are in: diverse companies and teams consistently outperform all others. It's not only the smart thing and the right thing, it makes getting the job done much more interesting.

I'm not sure if the shame/guilt distinction resonates for me. I just know that shame is a debilitating emotion that is perpetuated by Church and State.

Cynics know the answers without having penetrated deeply enough to know the questions. When challenged by mysterious truths, they marshall 'facts.

The beginning of personal transformation is absurdly easy. We have only to pay attention to the flow of attention itself.

If the King's English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for me!

Before we choose our tools and technology, we must choose our dreams and values, for some technologies serve them, while others make them more unobtainable.

The East contemplated the forest the West counted the trees...the mind that knows that trees and the forest is a new mind.

Spirituality is a kind of virgin wisdom, a knowing that comes prior to experience.

Real progress in understanding nature is rarely incremental. All important advances are sudden intuitions, new principles, new ways of seeing.

When one begins the transformative process, death and birth are imminent: the death of custom as authority, the birth of the self.

Although most of us are complacent in our assumption that science is gaining on the unknown, scientists are acknowledging that man's own brain is complex beyond any hope of complete understanding.

Love is a context, not a behavior.

Those who have most at stake in the old culture, or are most rigid in their beliefs, try to summon people back to the old ideas.'

We live what we know. If we believe the universe and ourselves to be mechanical, we will live mechanically.

A fully functioning employee with a healthy self-image is money in the bank.

There's power to: and everyone should have that, but everyone doesn't. Power to play Bach, or tennis, or boccie if you like. And there's power over; and no one should have that, but people do.

I'd discovered you never know yourself until you're tested and that you don't even know you're being tested until afterwards, and that in fact there isn't anyone giving the test except yourself.

In a great gasp, puts her head in her hands again and cries as if her throat were a cave, as if the howling winds came from her belly, she cries like a storm that will never end.

Desire consumes you, it takes you over. You forget yourself completely. All you can think about is the other, the one you desire, your self is just a fire.

rain is one thing the British do better than anybody else.

There is no power greater than the power of passive dependency.

She drowned in words that could not teach her how to swim.

in a way it doesn't matter whether you open doors or close them, you still end up in a box.

Never underestimate the power of helplessness!

you can't equate passive dependent power with assertive power because the dependent kind isn't fun, it doesn't give you a kick, it just allows you to survive.

The very notion of superiority of one kind over another will have to disappear, although differences among kind will remain.

You happened to me. You were as deep down as I’ve ever been. You were inside me like my pulse.

Good writing gives energy, whatever it is about.

Who gets to choose what battle takes her down?

Translation makes me look at how a poem is put together in a different way, without the personal investment of the poem I'm writing myself, but equally closely technically.

Translation is an interestingly different way to be involved both with poetry and with the language that I've found myself living in much of the time. I think the two feed each other.

Poetry dovetails contradictions.

Perhaps first and foremost is the challenge of taking what I find as a reader and making it into a poem that, primarily, has to be a plausible poem in English.

Did you love well what you very soon left? Come home and take me in your arms and take away this stomach ache, headache, heartache.

The pull between sound and syntax creates a kind of musical tension in the language that interests me.