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Alicia Ostriker Quotes

born 1937 United States

Alicia Suskin Ostriker (born November 11, 1937) is an poet and scholar who is Jewish and lives in the USA.

United States
20th-century poets

Random Alicia Ostriker quote

14 quotes

An essay is my way of pursuing an elusive intuition into the forest of what I cannot yet understand.

I believe that the flood of writing by eloquent women in our own time will alter the mainstream of American poetry.

Writing Like a Woman (1983)

Much more killing has been done by people who believed in heaven than by those who didn’t.

Part of the task of the artist is to reach across boundaries, to love and empathize with the other, the stranger.

The American Voice 45 (1998)

Let us never suppose that the structures of our human minds can contain God.

Women are transforming western religion--six thousand years of male monotheism will not be defeated overnight, but I hope to help.

Conversations with the World by Phebe Davidsen (1998)

Jewishness is not a single thing, it is multiple and full of inconsistencies.

The American Voice 45 (1998)

Experiment is valuable but so is tradition.

Acts of violence enter my poems because we live in a violent world.

To tell all the truth and tell it straight has become the program of most women poets. The truth is mysterious enough, and we are ignorant enough of it, so that lives may be well spent in its quest.

Writing Like a Woman (1983)

I typically don’t work in fixed forms, because I like a poem to have a feel of improvisation about it.

No writer should be without writing cohorts. You go mad. Even Emily Dickinson, famous for weaving a web of solitude round herself, had numerous literary friendships.

The American Voice 45 (1998)

I love the idea that I write poems that are porous. That have openings and loopholes and...invite people in rather than telling them something.

Conversations with the World by Phebe Davidsen (1998)

There was a beautiful stretch of time-the sixties, early seventies-when everybody's musical culture was together, and that was great. But now the shared culture is television commercials.

Conversations with the World by Phebe Davidsen (1998)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Alicia Ostriker (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.