Top 50 Anne Waldman Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I’d like to invoke the Native American Navajo because their word for road is used as a verb. Their whole relationship to road has to do with how you travel it, who you are traveling it with, what the environment might be, where you’re headed, in what direction, the weather and so on.”

— Anne Waldman

2. “I took my vow to poetry; this is where I’m going to be. These are my people; this is my tribe. This is where I’m going to put my energy.”

— Anne Waldman

3. “No one begs you to be a poet or write a 1000-page poem. You have to be fueled by a drive, a conviction – a need, a necessity, a vision that is so pressing that it has no other outlet but through you. That doesn’t mean that you are unconscious or in trance, but there can be moments like that.”

— Anne Waldman

4. “For me there is a poesis, a poetics, around the trope of the road that is embedded within many life experiences of the people I’ve been close to.”

— Anne Waldman

5. “If you can integrate your life to have a kind of meditative practice that is considering others.”

— Anne Waldman

6. “Myths, by their definition, involve transformations, struggles through various worlds or layers of reality and of obscuration.”

— Anne Waldman

7. “We can think for ourselves and we can awaken the world to a greater consciousness.”

— Anne Waldman

8. “How can you work on letting your thoughts go and getting synchronized into the moment and questioning your wild imagination. But I say just think of all the great Japanese and Chinese poets and scholars who were also meditators.”

— Anne Waldman

9. “Poets have to keep pushing, pushing, against the darkness, and write their way out of it as well.”

— Anne Waldman

10. “Certainly the beat writers I’ve known who carried forward the original, you know, I’d say that came together in the 1940s and 50s. So I was inheriting in a way some of that ethos.”

— Anne Waldman

11. “We had much more imagery from Vietnam war. The media was not controlled. The storyline, the master narrative was not controlled. I thin it was some those images really radicalized people and shifted things to some extent. And the Viet Cong also, their tenacity.”

— Anne Waldman

12. “I remember being caught in this earthquake in Mexico City and having a sense of people coming before me, of being part of this lineage. I felt similarly when I went to India and South America.”

— Anne Waldman

13. “I think Visions of Cody is the most radical book in terms of poetic stretch and the way Jack Kerouac is able to incorporate documentation and incorporate the live tape recording of Neal and so on.”

— Anne Waldman

14. “My father shared the ethos of many of the beat writers and was a friend of Allen Ginsberg. Probably for 25 years of my father’s life, He had been an itinerant piano player and so traveled the road with bands and that sort of thing.”

— Anne Waldman

15. “A lot of my father’s generation were thinking about communism and had deep liberal and progressive connections. He never admitted whether he was a card-carrying communist party member but I think its possible.”

— Anne Waldman

16. “My teachers were often very eccentric.”

— Anne Waldman

17. “We still have our larynx, we still have our minds and we still have our consciousness. We still have this gift to make things with words and images and get outside these preordained tropes and ways of thinking and the master narratives – what’s handed to us.”

— Anne Waldman

18. “I grew up in New York City in Greenwich Village and had parents who were somewhat bohemian so I was always on the nonconformist side of the equation.”

— Anne Waldman

19. “I don’t think it is as a trope or as something in our psyches. There’s very little wilderness out there but there is wild mind, and the Wild mind that actually, as Gary Snyder says, wants to take care of things. There’s an elegant quality to the wild mind.”

— Anne Waldman

20. “I’m concerned about the overuse of spectacular places. And there’s no real wilderness left and so there’s a heartbreak there. You can go anywhere and be rescued through your cell phone and have some helicopter drop down.”

— Anne Waldman

21. “Connection to Buddhism is strand in my life.”

— Anne Waldman

22. “I like the idea of the object, the relic. And I see it as a time machine too or a device you plug into a socket that activates a sound and light show.”

— Anne Waldman

23. “When I look at my life there are these streams, these things that have continuity from the fifties to now.”

— Anne Waldman

24. “We need a world-wide Department of Peace.”

— Anne Waldman

25. “My father was a frustrated writer. I think he wanted to write the great American novel.”

— Anne Waldman

26. “I was going to public school in the post-World War II, the grey doldrum years. But I was in this extraordinary environment of Manhattan, of Greenwich Village, of bohemian parents.”

— Anne Waldman

27. “It’s so rich as a trope – the whole idea of the road and it being in terms of language, being an active experience.”

— Anne Waldman

28. “I think of the amazing things that were going on. So it’s so rich. The doors keep opening.”

— Anne Waldman

29. “I think of my father born in this very small, limited situation and then coming out of that. Many people have this story.”

— Anne Waldman

30. “World War II synchronizes things for a lot of people. There’s a kind of wakeup call.”

— Anne Waldman

31. “My mother started taking us to church when I was in seventh or eight grade. That was always a question, Do you believe in God?”

— Anne Waldman

32. “Our need to reimagine our world through the vibratory larynx, that’s what matters. Re-awaken the world to itself. Through ideas, pictures, sounds. Hold the mirror up to “nature.””

— Anne Waldman

33. “I think for me in terms of this kind of dichotomy you have to hold the sense of negative capability in your mind – which is Keats line about being able to hold two different ideas ‘without any irritable reach after fact or reason.’”

— Anne Waldman

34. “If I smashed the traditions it was because I knew no traditions. I’m the girl with the unquenchable thirst.”

— Anne Waldman

35. “I was raised with a sense of democratic vistas and egalitarianism.”

— Anne Waldman

36. “I was not ever hitchhiking alone. I’ve done solo train trips but I’ve never driven myself alone.”

— Anne Waldman

37. “Contemporary movies just drive me crazy. The violence and the sentimentality and the spiritual materialism and Theism and the incredible indulgence in ignorance is so claustrophobic.”

— Anne Waldman

38. “How infuriating it is to be continually born to war that continues one’s whole lifetime, even as one protests it – what futility. It is perhaps a more public epic in this regard, and carries a ritual vocalization.”

— Anne Waldman

39. “A lot of my life has involved with helping create cultures that have as their basis this vision of the sharing, the partaking of a certain ethos together.”

— Anne Waldman

40. “The text for me is the musical score. I’m the instrument. My voice is the instrument. My voice is articulating the sounds which are coming through the imaginings and visitations in my head, and I’m making these sounds but I’ve selected them from an ocean of sound.”

— Anne Waldman

41. “I still had to correct Allen Ginsberg at times when he called women girls. I’d say. Allen please, it’s not politically correct.”

— Anne Waldman

42. “I’m curious about other universes, and nonhuman elementals. For me it’s still a very lively ethos. It’s a kind of practice. It’s an ethos that is very sustaining.”

— Anne Waldman

43. “For me the road became a zone, in places like Saint Marks poetry Project where I worked for 12 years.”

— Anne Waldman

44. “Think of the road as a kind of zone and a site of incredible diversity.”

— Anne Waldman

45. “Growing up in the fifties, having to wear a dog tag, having to take shelter in a bomb shelter. That turned me toward the road, I did not want to live in fear of that, I was gong to work somehow against what that vision was, and what that horror was. It was poetry, art, music.”

— Anne Waldman

46. “I get very upset when money is being cut and people can’t visit the Grand Canyon.”

— Anne Waldman

47. “I have students whose fathers are voting for Sarah Palin. It’s wild.”

— Anne Waldman

48. “There’s a kind of training, when you are sitting in a session in the Japanese tradition or any of the Buddhist traditions, taking your lotus posture or whatever it is. That’s what you’re doing.”

— Anne Waldman

49. “For me poems are acts re-done, and that can vibrate well into the future.”

— Anne Waldman

50. “The beat literary movement is strong because of those very challenging and individual relationships and styles and contention and so on. So I just feel blessed by this kind of opportunity that came from it. It was a kind of seed.”

— Anne Waldman