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What keeps me level is the refusal to let the best of human aspirations die in the face of the challenges. I make a moral decision to be hopeful.

Alison Hawthorne Deming

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Alison Hawthorne Deming
Age: 78
Born: 1946
Born: January 1
Essayist
Poet
Writer
Moral
Refusal
Dies
Hopeful
Face
Aspiration
Faces
Keeps
Best
Level
Human
Levels
Humans
Challenges
Make
Decision
Aspirations

More quotes by Alison Hawthorne Deming

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I'm always trying to ask myself both Who am I as an individual? and What are the cultural forces that have made me the person that I am? How can I understand myself as a cultural creature as well as an individual? I'm really obsessed with that question, and always asking my students to consider it.
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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Sometimes it gets talked about as if life is all about the individual, and I don't think it is. I'm really interested in what writing can contribute to a kind of cultural intelligence.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
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A lot of times students will come up to me and say, Well, I can't write because I don't know what I think about such-and-such. And I say, That's why you have to write. You don't wait until you know, because then who cares - it's static.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
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One needs to be on guard against expecting external powers to decide when you can take yourself seriously as an artist. It can be a long wait - and lead to endless appetite.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
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I don't want people to write programmatic environmental poems, but I think sustainability should become deeply a part of the consciousness of poetry - an impulse toward compassion, empathy, and social justice.
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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As writers, the world is not about individual expression entirely because we are producing works of literature and getting them out into the world.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
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Writers want recognition, audience, some corroboration that all those hours at the desk and in daydreams add up to something in the esteem of others.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
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I've been accused of darkness by my inner light.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
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As poets, we don't accept oppression we are about a freedom of spirit, or whatever you want to call it. I think environmental concerns have to go to the deep place, so we speak from a place of great empathy for the planet - for the disadvantaged people, animals, places, cultures.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
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It's extremely important that, as writers, we give a voice to those who don't have voices, including the other animals that we share the planet with and the places that are endangered or being lost.
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 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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Earth's immune system - its rapid response team of self-protection - becomes invigorated at times of peril. And one sees it at play now in the upwelling of grassroots work aimed at finding a sustainable future.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
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I was attacked by two dogs when I was three and a half years old. I'm lucky to be alive. My face was stitched back together and here I still am, gratefully so. I believe that experience shocked me into a deep alliance with the animal world, its beauty and viciousness and terror.
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 don't know much about death and the sorriest lesson I've learned is that words, my most trusted guardians against chaos, offer small comfort in the face of anyone's dying.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
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I like to use research to enlarge the poem. And sometimes a rhetorical or syntactical gesture stitches the poem along.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
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What I like about teaching is the discipline of finding words to unpack the artistic process. And I admire the drive in students who want to write, the mystery of how artistic talent unfolds.
Alison Hawthorne Deming