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I'm extremely interested in science as the mythos within which I live. Science tells me what kind of animal I am, what kind of a universe I live in. It's always deepening my understanding of the natural world.

Alison Hawthorne Deming

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Alison Hawthorne Deming
Age: 78
Born: 1946
Born: January 1
Essayist
Poet
Writer
Natural
Deepening
Science
Extremely
Live
Tells
Kind
Interested
Always
Animal
World
Within
Understanding
Universe
Mythos

More quotes by Alison Hawthorne Deming

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If you have this deep feeling of empathy for the natural world, you feel it so profoundly. It's almost a religious experience. I feel that I could never really say the depth of feeling or connection I feel to the natural world, which has made me.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
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We're facing enormous changes in our planetary life, with climate change and the adaptations that all natural systems are going to have to make to these climate changes, and so it's extremely important to bear witness to what's happening.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
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I'm just really interested in the interface of the individual with the collective. I think that's where the arts live.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
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I grow very impatient with prose writers who don't pay attention to the cadence of the sentence. If you start as a poet, you're wooed by the music of language you want to put that into your practice.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
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I came to teaching late - not until my forties - which is one reason why I'm not burned out.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
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I'm trying to learn something about making a balance between the inner life and the outer life. I wouldn't write if I didn't need to be making those discoveries, if I didn't feel the perpetual ignorance of being a human being.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
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For me teaching has provided community and livelihood and the satisfaction of passing along what I've learned to others.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
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Climate change is a moral challenge, not simply an economic or technological problem. It is linked to social justice, because it is the poor citizens of the world who will suffer the most from our excesses.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
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I'm interested in thinking about how are we contributing to the culture, what we can write that might help us deepen the culture, make us more reflective, make us more empathetic, make us feel our connectedness in other ways.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
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You see this incredible capacity for replication in nature, survival, development, all of these things that are around us all the time in nature that just happen. By comparison, human life is really, really complicated. We're gifted animals, but we are so complicated. Nothing is easy for us, except maybe eating too much.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
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I like to joke that I started writing long poems out the anxiety over ending and starting poems. It just seemed easier to keep going.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
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There are landscapes and species that are not going to be here a hundred years from now, fifty years from now. One gift we as writers give to the world is to bear witness to these landscapes and species as we have experienced them.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
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We're nature. Our minds are nature. Our desire to make poetry is nature.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
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I like the dance between sustained focus and digression that the long poem invites. A controlling metaphor helps to sustain the long poem.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
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I'm filled with despair. We live in a pathological culture filled with rage and bitterness and greed. The hate-mongering and racism is reaching a frightening pitch.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
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I like bringing poetry's focus on figurative language and compression into the essay. Of course, the musical properties of language, the cadence of the sentence, are really important to me in prose.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
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I do think environmental writers need to be forward thinking, not just lamenting our losses. We do need to lament in some ways it's important to be the vessels for grief for all that's being lost on our planet. But we also need to be forward thinking.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
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When we're writing anything, we're bearing witness to the time we live in and how it's different from any other time in history.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
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Teachers have had a great effect on me as a child. I've always loved school and had a great appetite for learning. I cried when it was time to go back home and tried to jump from my mother's moving car to run back there.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
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I had real concerns about the relationship between nature and culture and places I wanted to write about... I thought, well, maybe I should try prose. It was a real struggle to begin because, first of all, there were so many words on the page - it was terrifying... Beginning was awful.
Alison Hawthorne Deming