Quote

Mind led body to the edge of the precipice. They stared in desire at the naked abyss. If you love me, said mind, take that step into silence. If you love me, said body, turn and exist.

Anne Stevenson

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Anne Stevenson
Age: 87 †
Born: 1933
Born: January 3
Died: 2020
Died: September 14
Literary Critic
Poet
Writer
Anne Katharine Stevenson
Take
Step
Mind
Exist
Love
Steps
Precipice
Silence
Stared
Turn
Abyss
Turns
Edge
Desire
Edges
Body
Naked

More quotes by Anne Stevenson

Image
Sylvia Plath was just a month and a half older than I, and when she committed suicide I was only 30 - and very shocked and sorry. I never knew her personally.
Anne Stevenson
Image
I write, or used to write, to explain to myself situations I couldn't otherwise solve or understand. Meditation comes very naturally to me.
Anne Stevenson
Image
I play with language a great deal in my poems, and I enjoy that. I try to condense language, that is, I try to express complicated but I hope real emotions as simply as possible. But that doesn't mean the poems are simple, just that they are as truthful as I can make them.
Anne Stevenson
Image
You've got criminal courts and child welfare officials refusing to do their jobs and protect children so they can shift the cases over to family court where predatory professionals can turn a dirty buck off the atrocities committed against children.
Anne Stevenson
Image
Blackbirds are the cellos of the deep farms.
Anne Stevenson
Image
My soul, how will I recognize you if we meet?
Anne Stevenson
Image
There's no friend like someone who has known you since you were five.
Anne Stevenson
Image
My earlier poems were sadder than my poems are today, perhaps because I wrote them in confusion or when I was unhappy. But I am not a melancholy person, quite the contrary, no one enjoys laughing more than I do.
Anne Stevenson
Image
I like rhyme because it is memorable, I like form because having to work to a pattern gives me original ideas.
Anne Stevenson
Image
democracy is dying. We are ruled by faceless bureaucrats and lecherous puritans. ... You think about it. 'All right for me but not for you' is their philosophy.
Anne Stevenson
Image
Yes, I do often write poems from the mind, but I hope I don't ignore feelings and emotions.
Anne Stevenson
Image
I remain loyal to Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert in music and to Shakespeare and Jane Austen in literature.
Anne Stevenson
Image
I am now seventy, rather glad, really, that I won't live to see the horrors to come in the 21st century.
Anne Stevenson
Image
Blake has always been a favorite, the lyrics, not so much the prophetic books, but I suppose Yeats influenced me more as a young poet, and the American, Robert Frost.
Anne Stevenson
Image
There comes a time when you have to trust your own judgment, when you must close your eyes and let your instinct rule you.
Anne Stevenson
Image
When everything is for 'fun' nothing is for the good.
Anne Stevenson
Image
I work very hard on all my poems, but most of the work consists of trying not to sound as if I had worked. I try to make them sound as natural as possible, but within a quite strict form, which to my ears has a lot to do with musical rhythm and sound.
Anne Stevenson
Image
I think a poet, like a painter, should be a craftsperson.
Anne Stevenson
Image
Peter Lucas and I live in Durham but spend a great of time in North Wales, where we have a cottage in the mountains, and in Vermont, USA, with my sister - who is a children's writer married to a poet.
Anne Stevenson
Image
There is far too much literary criticism of the wrong kind. That is why I never could have survived as an academic.
Anne Stevenson