Susan Howe > Quotes

“Now faith is not what we
hereafter have we have a
world resting on nothing

Rest was never more than
abstract since it is empty
reality we cannot escape”
― Susan Howe, Souls of the Labadie Tract

“we that were wood
when that wide wood was

in a physical Universe playing with


words

bark be my limbs my hair be leaf
Bride be my bow my lyre my quiver ”
― Susan Howe

“Herman Melville is not comforting. Emily Dickinson isn’t either. Maybe their work is too hungry for comfort, or just too vivid for comfort. But Henry James is – profoundly so. Because he is tender. The tenderness is there in the structure of the sentence. He knows the way the poor and the dead are forgotten by the living, and he cannot allow that to happen. So he keeps on writing for them, for the dead, as if they were children to be sheltered and loved, never abandoned.”
― Susan Howe

“Edwards’s stark presentation of the immanent consciousness of Separation enters the structure of her poems. Each word is a cipher, through its sensible sign another sign hidden. The recipient of a letter, or combination of letter and poem from Emily Dickinson, was forced much like Edwards’ listening congregation, through shock and through subtraction of the ordinary, to a new way of perceiving. Subject and object were fused at that moment, into the immediate feeling of understanding. This re-ordering of the forward process of reading is what makes her poetry and the prose of her letters among the most original writing of her century.”
― Susan Howe, My Emily Dickinson

“We are all clothed with fleece of sheep I keep saying as if

I were singing as these words do. Throw a shawl over me

so you won't be afraid to sleep. I have already shown that

space is God.”
― Susan Howe, Souls of the Labadie Tract

“Originality is the discovery of how to shed identity before the magic mirror of Antiquity's sovereign power.”
― Susan Howe, My Emily Dickinson

“A poem is an invocation, rebellious return to the blessedness of beginning again, wandering free in pure process of forgetting and finding.”
― Susan Howe, My Emily Dickinson

“God was true everything was

a mother's role in childhood

Someone was in that garden

each knowing the other to be

entirely inasmuch what each

believed or what confessed for

cordial confinement is God's

glory each seed every word”
― Susan Howe, Souls of the Labadie Tract

“Once you admit that time past is actually infinite, being a child gradually fades out.
:::
That this book is a history of
a shadow that is a shadow of

me mystically one in another
Another another to subserve”
― Susan Howe, That This