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Deciding to remember, and what to remember, is how we decide who we are.

Robert Pinsky

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Robert Pinsky
Age: 84
Born: 1940
Born: October 20
Librarian
Literary Critic
Poet
Translator
Writer
Long Branch
New Jersey
Memories
Remember
Deciding
Decide
Identity

More quotes by Robert Pinsky

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Whatever makes a child want to glue macaroni on a paper plate and paint the assemblage and see it on the refrigerator - that has always been strong in me.
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I have always been thinking about the sounds and shades and aromas of words - fitting them together or disrupting their customary march - more or less every second of my life, waking and sleeping.
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Autobiography is a genre notorious for falsehood.
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The medium of poetry is not words, the medium of poetry is not lines-it is the motion of air inside the human body, coming out through the chest and the voice box and through the mouth to shape sounds that have meaning. It's bodily.
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There is something cathartic about having absolute loss articulated.
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Poetry’s medium is the individual chest and throat and mouth of whoever undertakes to say the poem.
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An underestimated element in poetry, that reading aloud makes clear, is the pause. I mean especially the force of a pause or a couple of pauses close together, contrasted with a longer unit of grammar.
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Poetry's medium is not merely light as air, it is air: vital and deep as ordinary breath.
Robert Pinsky
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To talk about the reality of life here and the work that you do here at the university.
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Art will not solve your problems. It will not enable you to live merrily.
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In the particular presence of memorable language we can find a reminder of our ability to know and retain knowledge itself: the brightness wherein all things come to see.
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Poetic language is singularly appropriate for recounting the life of the king who is traditionally accepted as the author of the poetic psalms, some of which are included in the narrative.
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For Aliki Barnstone, poetry seems a natural medium. The vision and cadences of these poems suggest a sensibility for which poetry is as inevitable as breathing or eating.
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When I had no roof I made audacity my roof.
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If a poem is written well, it was written with the poet's voice and for a voice. Reading a poem silently instead of saying a poem is like the difference between staring at sheet music and actually humming or playing the music on an instrument.
Robert Pinsky