Top 50 Alice Notley Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I do utterly despise dailiness as it stands. I can’t abide what the world has become, the frozen-ness of our product this evil thing that we kiss the ass of every hour. I want a dailiness that is free and beautiful.”

— Alice Notley

2. “Writing poetry is what I am. I wouldn’t know what else to be.”

— Alice Notley

3. “In love there is no because.”

— Alice Notley

4. “Who defined me? My culture, a culture of mercy, a living codex. I am a unique culture of one, from everywhere. I am her map and her self. I am everyone in the story; I am the story.”

— Alice Notley

5. “And if you’re referring to your anguish, it’s just a thing. The shape of a trailor, a wheel, or a knife. Leave the details of your life and find another one.”

— Alice Notley

6. “I knew you were in charge of me but my mind broke on its own.”

— Alice Notley

7. “I want this noise within me to die down.”

— Alice Notley

8. “I’m afraid the way I think is an anthropological relic.”

— Alice Notley

9. “We were ALways in this other time.”

— Alice Notley

10. “You will receive in flashes a new knowledge in language you won’t know.”

— Alice Notley

11. “You were sick, so sick, with your wound of thwarted longing.”

— Alice Notley

12. “I have just transcended my epoch; I am alive outside written memory.”

— Alice Notley

13. “Another way to say it: we are each the whole thing, and I merge with you when I wish.”

— Alice Notley

14. “I feel like an old, opaque secret.”

— Alice Notley

15. “This is my heart, or is it yours, I move within.”

— Alice Notley

16. “I rest all night in the eye of a hurricane.”

— Alice Notley

17. “I didn’t mean to be born.”

— Alice Notley

18. “I’ll never know how to live, will you? That was blood in my eyes, not flames.”

— Alice Notley

19. “I am void of what you would expect.”

— Alice Notley

20. “I wasn’t any person any more.”

— Alice Notley

21. “I did not do those things; I only watched, watched myself act, react.”

— Alice Notley

22. “I’ve been in love in a dream.”

— Alice Notley

23. “I couldn’t sleep in my dream.”

— Alice Notley

24. “I seem to love you, though I never see you.”

— Alice Notley

25. “Your thoughts have given up, finally.”

— Alice Notley

26. “Can’t I go lonely to bed?”

— Alice Notley

27. “I can’t translate myself into language any more.”

— Alice Notley

28. “Jack of diamonds is a hard card, why should there be a story? It’s too hard a card to please, and it isn’t the no earth I know. I got hepatitis C from shooting speed thirty-three years ago.”

— Alice Notley

29. “You used to be alive, now you’re almost mythic.”

— Alice Notley

30. “Because we rejected a certain kind of critical language people just assumed that we were dumb.”

— Alice Notley

31. “I didn’t care much what happened to me, so chance didn’t matter.”

— Alice Notley

32. “I am the only language I can understand.”

— Alice Notley

33. “No longer the dream we were invited to long ago.”

— Alice Notley

34. “I am a skeleton. I have a skull with an artifice of fire in its eyes.”

— Alice Notley

35. “But there’s a pain in lack of reasons.”

— Alice Notley

36. “I only remember that it all hurt.”

— Alice Notley

37. “Bodiless we don’t suffer: in a dream we aren’t hungry, don’t mourn you.”

— Alice Notley

38. “You’ll never leave me now. You’re mine. Be as I say.”

— Alice Notley

39. “You talk to me in your sleep, the only time you talk to me.”

— Alice Notley

40. “I’m fated, and I’m entirely yours.”

— Alice Notley

41. “Come apart in my mouth.”

— Alice Notley

42. “Didn’t want anyone to find me, not yet.”

— Alice Notley

43. “I expect to hear voices forever, even after I’m dead.”

— Alice Notley

44. “She starts to get used to being sacrificed.”

— Alice Notley

45. “I like it in hell – I always have.”

— Alice Notley

46. “Prophesy if you dare.”

— Alice Notley

47. “I don’t want this part where I don’t know if I’ve dreamed it or not.”

— Alice Notley

48. “Distortion’s all that I know.”

— Alice Notley

49. “I could have stayed out of this one; I didn’t.”

— Alice Notley

50. “I am the being within you, outside time and unhaunted.”

— Alice Notley