Top 30 Eileen Myles Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Time passes. That’s for sure.”

— Eileen Myles

2. “I hope you all find yourself sleeping with someone you love, maybe not all of the time, but a lot of the time. The touch of a foot in the night is sincere. I hope you like your work, I hope there’s mystery and poetry in your life, not even poems, but patterns. I hope you can see them. Often these patterns will wake you up, and you will know that you are alive, again and again.”

— Eileen Myles

3. “I still feel like the world is a piece of bread, I’m holding out half to you.”

— Eileen Myles

4. “People love discovering you. The thing about not being historically a mainstream writer is that everyone feels like you’re theirs, you’re their friend.”

— Eileen Myles

5. “I’m a poet born in the era of Andy Warhol and a generation that wanted to be famous.”

— Eileen Myles

6. “I really just love reading. It’s my favorite thing, performing my poems live.”

— Eileen Myles

7. “The room was the poem, the day I was in. Oh Christ. What writes my poem is the second ring, inner or outer. Poetry is just the performance of it. These little things, whether I write them or not. That’s the score. The thing of great value is you. Where you are, glowing and fading, while you live.”

— Eileen Myles

8. “The bag I wanted was beyond reason – something to hold my poems, twice as big as the universe and it must be androgynous.”

— Eileen Myles

9. “I hope you all find yourselves sleeping with someone you love, maybe not all of the time, but a lot of the time. The touch of a foot in the night is sincere.”

— Eileen Myles

10. “Lucifer’s name means light and the reason they threw him out of heaven and he became the biggest devil and not the biggest saint anymore was what he did with language.”

— Eileen Myles

11. “If the end of one’s youth is a thin slice of cheese I ate mine standing in that room. I was there because I was hungry. That’s all.”

— Eileen Myles

12. “The poet is like the wise fool or like a version of the stand-up, because we’re standing, we’re doing stand-up. That’s exactly what we’re doing.”

— Eileen Myles

13. “Sometimes in utter hopelessness I put my cheek on the table like it was someone. I wanted to wake my brain up and be loved.”

— Eileen Myles

14. “I was a working-class kid from Boston. But I never lost my accent because I felt like that was what I was doing. I didn’t have to perform Woody Guthrie like Bob Dylan did in the ’60s, I just had to make myself be Eileen Myles and let that be my shield.”

— Eileen Myles

15. “What I started to understand was that the poem was made out of time–past, present and future. It lives in the present, it breathes there and that’s how you let anyone in. I think people can feel this accessing of time in poetry very readily. As soon as the poem ceases to be about anything, when it even stops saving things, stops being such a damn collector, it becomes an invite to the only refuge which is the impossible moment of being alive.”

— Eileen Myles

16. “Nope, I am destroyed. A shattered boat of a person. A broken window here, a lousy bell there. An old crappy dyke with half a brain leaking into a book. A drippy excrescence. A schmear.”

— Eileen Myles

17. “Women aren’t physically afraid of men; women are genetically afraid of men. It’s happened for such a long time.”

— Eileen Myles

18. “You know how you’re always half hungry while in bed. Well this was like sleeping with a meal, a big fried meal, you have your arms around it.”

— Eileen Myles

19. “I wonder, would I have transitioned from female to male if I was 30 years younger? Possibly. But if I had been born even 30 years later, because it seems like the technology will only get better, it seems like one might not ever need to settle down at all.”

— Eileen Myles

20. “Poetry is my politics. It’s an opportunity that gives me a way to speak.”

— Eileen Myles

21. “What happened was private. I was in it with Rose. She had hurt me grievously and now I was forever attached. I was in it now with all the women in the world. I walked home glad. I will die, I thought with a bounce in my step. I’m whole. Not whole like anyone else, but whole like me. Painful, but simple. It was very simple now.”

— Eileen Myles

22. “People loved to talk about how Frank O’Hara didn’t really care about getting published. That doesn’t jibe with my experience.”

— Eileen Myles

23. “I always think of childhood as the inarticulate moment, and you have your little camera. You were filming it, recording it, you just didn’t know how to speak it.”

— Eileen Myles

24. “But if I paid attention, really paid attention maybe I could ignore the mountain of sadness and she might entertain and distract me and I would think this is life. The romance and the sadness. I am in it now. I did do that which is what happened.”

— Eileen Myles

25. “The best thing you can do for a writer is give them a bad review.”

— Eileen Myles

26. “You can’t force a story that doesn’t want to be told.”

— Eileen Myles

27. “I think being with a person is better than caring about them. I cared about them. I cared about them more than their relatives did, and I didn’t care about them at all.”

— Eileen Myles

28. “If boys were always trying to get in girls’ pants, what did they want? What could the girls give them? Pee it seemed to me was an appropriate gift.”

— Eileen Myles

29. “Allen Ginsberg asked me to sign his book. I must’ve stood there for five minutes drawing a complete blank. Hi Allen, from one howl to another. Dear Allen I’m glad you think I’m a poet. Love, Eileen. I’m the only woman you like, right Allen? Only the craziest thoughts passed through my mind. Finally he started getting embarrassed. Just sign it. Come by and write something better when you think of it. I scrawled something. I forget what it was.”

— Eileen Myles

30. “Awards are the only currency Amercian writing has to describe a writer’s work.”

— Eileen Myles

31. “Part of the glamour of being a poet was always this long reach into the future. You knew you were managing time.”

— Eileen Myles

32. “I have waited all my life for permission. I feel it growing in my breast. A war is storming and it is behind me and I am moving my forces into light.”

— Eileen Myles

33. “The secret of the world, the inside of it – I had evidence now – was undeniably lesbian. And every woman I knew wanted to be one. And I wanted Rose. Day in and day out. My wanting her was my wanting to be alive.”

— Eileen Myles

34. “In grade school we were cautioned if we couldn’t draw faces we could just leave them orange. Sometimes I am flying by so fast and the people are faceless like dying stars and I am so alone.”

— Eileen Myles