Eileen Myles > Quotes

“Listen, I have been educated.
I have learned about Western
Civilization. Do you know
What the message of Western
Civilization is? I am alone.”
― Eileen Myles

“Literature is love. I think it went like this: drawings in the cave, sounds in the cave, songs in the cave, songs about us. Later, stories about us. Part of what we always did was have sex and fight about it and break each other’s hearts. I guess there’s other kinds of love too. Great friendships. Working together. But poetry and novels are lists of our devotions. We love the feel of making the marks as the feelings are rising and falling. Living in literature and love is the best thing there is. You’re always home.”
― Eileen Myles

“If passion was a substance I would say it is dark brown, and then blood red. It's like wet grass, tons of it soaked in mud. It's warm and it stinks like shit and it's unaccountably and endlessly good. It's thick and it goes on for miles and it isn't so much deep as bottomless and it holds you in its grip, you never drown. And then it goes. That's all you know.”
― Eileen Myles, Inferno

“I hope you all find yourself sleeping with someone you love, maybe not all of the time, but a lot of the time. The touch of a foot in the night is sincere. I hope you like your work, I hope there's mystery and poetry in your life, not even poems, but patterns. I hope you can see them. Often these patterns will wake you up, and you will know that you are alive, again and again.”
― Eileen Myles

“If there is something I will always carry in my heart it is this earnest unwillingness to be part of the bunch,”
― Eileen Myles, Chelsea Girls: A Novel

“I am always hungry and wanting to have sex. This is a fact.”
― Eileen Myles, Not Me

“Sometimes in utter hopelessness I put my cheek on the table like it was someone. I wanted to wake my brain up and be loved.”
― Eileen Myles, Inferno

“Time passes. That's for sure.”
― Eileen Myles

“If the end of one's youth is a thin slice of cheese I ate mine standing in that room. I was there because I was hungry. That's all.”
― Eileen Myles, Chelsea Girls

“The bag I wanted was beyond reason - something to hold my poems, twice as big as the universe and it must be androgynous.”
― Eileen Myles

“All the details of my life were in exact order and yet I was tumbling in them-out of order like a tremendous wave had hit me and I was thrown off the ship and I awoke or dreaming, or dead I knew not-no I couldn't speak.”
― Eileen Myles, Inferno

“But if I paid attention, really paid attention maybe I could ignore the mountain of sadness and she might entertain and distract me and I would think this is life. The romance and the sadness. I am in it now. I did do that which is what happened.”
― Eileen Myles, Inferno

“I have waited all my life for permission. I feel it growing in my breast. A war is storming and it is behind me and I am moving my forces into light.”
― Eileen Myles (author), Chelsea Girls

“You can’t force a story that doesn’t want to be told.”
― Eileen Myles, Chelsea Girls: A Novel

“(Interviews Ntozake Shange) “What do you think an artist’s job is?”
“To keep our sensibilities alive, so we aren’t numb by our struggles to survive. That’s what I think our job is right now.”
― Eileen Myles, The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art

“What happened was private. I was in it with Rose. She had hurt me grievously and now I was forever attached. I was in it now with all the women in the world. I walked home glad. I will die, I thought with a bounce in my step. I'm whole. Not whole like anyone else, but whole like me. Painful, but simple. It was very simple now.”
― Eileen Myles, Inferno

“What I started to understand was that the poem was made out of time–past, present and future. It lives in the present, it breathes there and that’s how you let anyone in. I think people can feel this accessing of time in poetry very readily. As soon as the poem ceases to be about anything, when it even stops saving things, stops being such a damn collector, it becomes an invite to the only refuge which is the impossible moment of being alive.”
― Eileen Myles

“The poet’s life is just so much crenellated waste, nights and days whipping swiftly or laboriously past the cinematic window. We’re hunched and weaving over the keys of our green our grey or pink blue manual typewriter maybe a darker stone cold thoritative selectric with its orgasmic expectant hum and us popping pills and laughing over what you or I just wrote, wondering if that line means insult or sex. Or both. Usually both.”
― Eileen Myles, Inferno

“Allen Ginsberg asked me to sign his book. I must've stood there for five minutes drawing a complete blank. Hi Allen, from one howl to another. Dear Allen I'm glad you think I'm a poet. Love, Eileen. I'm the only woman you like, right Allen? Only the craziest thoughts passed through my mind. Finally he started getting embarrassed. Just sign it. Come by and write something better when you think of it. I scrawled something. I forget what it was.”
― Eileen Myles, Chelsea Girls

“For all these reasons (...) working class intellectuals like big words and their sentence formation is excessively ornate. It's what they think of as 'smart'. Pomposity. It's an embarrassing condition of being unsophisticated and not knowing what is truly smart which is simplicity and modernism; certainly it was twenty years ago that I learned to write. But the working class person is above all afraid to seem dumb so in acting 'smart' and footnoting everything they betray the insecurity and weightiness of the unexperienced conclusion, which is an imitation of what writers are like. In general I think writers are not smart. They are something else and each writer can fill in a word here, but smart is not what that word is.”
― Eileen Myles, The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art

“In the month of December I couldn’t get out of bed. I kept waking up at 6 P.M. and it was Christmas or New Year’s and I had to start drinking & eating.”
― Eileen Myles, I Must Be Living Twice: New and Selected Poems

“I still feel like the world is a piece of bread, I’m holding out half to you”
― Eileen Myles

“Nope, I am destroyed. A shattered boat of a person. A broken window here, a lousy bell there. An old crappy dyke with half a brain leaking into a book. A drippy excrescence. A schmear.”
― Eileen Myles, Inferno

“And how are your teeth tonight?

Can you afford to fix them?”
― Eileen Myles

“If boys were always trying to get in girls’ pants, what did they want? What could the girls give them? Pee it seemed to me was an appropriate gift.”
― Eileen Myles, Chelsea Girls: A Novel

“You know how you’re always half hungry while in bed. Well this was like sleeping with a meal, a big fried meal, you have your arms around it.”
― Eileen Myles, Chelsea Girls: A Novel

“For some reason I just want to mention another German artist I like a lot. Imi Knoebel. He once described hiding in an attic during the bombing of Dresden and how the flashes of bombs filled a triangular shaped window in the room he was in and the experience contributed to his love of simple shapes. Is that love or merely imprinting. It was simple and strong and one is forced in a way to see the world the way it IS shaped. Art becomes a momory more than anything else. A kind of chooser. It shows how we were touched.”
― Eileen Myles, The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art

“already I know it will hurt this is the hurt country”
― Eileen Myles, I Must Be Living Twice: New and Selected Poems

“I’ve often thought of a female Christ. David told me there’s one in a church in Montreal. Mostly the world can’t take it. Because of people’s feelings about the delicacy of women and also because of what a meaningless display female suffering simply is. If you belittle us in school, treat us like slaves at home and finally, if you get a woman alone in bed just tell her she’s all wrong, no matter what sex you are. . . or maybe you just grab one on the street and fuck her real fast—in an alley, or in her own bed.
I mean if that’s the way it usually goes for this girl what would be the point in seeing her half nude and nailed up? Where’s the contradiction? Could that drive the culture for 2,000 years? No way. Female suffering must be hidden, or nothing can work. It’s a man’s world and a girl on a cross would be like seeing a dead animal in a trap. We like to eat them, or see them stuffed, we even like to wear them, but watch them suffer? Hear them wail?”
― Eileen Myles, Cool for You

“The best thing you can do for a writer is give them a bad review.”
― Eileen Myles