Top 40 Marilyn Hacker Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Women love a sick child or a healthy animal; A man who is both itches them like an incubus.”

— Marilyn Hacker

2. “Good writing gives energy, whatever it is about.”

— Marilyn Hacker

3. “The woman poet must be either a sexless, reclusive eccentric, with nothing to say specifically to women, or a brilliant, tragic, tortured suicide.”

— Marilyn Hacker

4. “The ambiguities of language, both in terms of vocabulary and syntax, are fascinating: how important connotation is, what is lost and what is gained in the linguistic transition.”

— Marilyn Hacker

5. “You happened to me. You were as deep down as I’ve ever been. You were inside me like my pulse.”

— Marilyn Hacker

6. “Translation is an interestingly different way to be involved both with poetry and with the language that I’ve found myself living in much of the time. I think the two feed each other.”

— Marilyn Hacker

7. “I’m addicted to email, but other than that, there are practical things – being able to buy a book on the internet that you can’t find in your local bookshop. This could be a lifeline if you live further from the sources.”

— Marilyn Hacker

8. “I lived in the studio apartment that I bought for four years before I bought it in 1989, so I was already in it. I began living there in 1985, so I’ve had the same address and phone number since then.”

— Marilyn Hacker

9. “My mother was told she couldn’t go to medical school because she was a woman and a Jew. So she became a teacher in the New York City public school system.”

— Marilyn Hacker

10. “When you translate poetry in particular, you’re obliged to look at how the writer with whom you’re working puts together words, sentences, phrases, the triple tension between the line of verse, the syntax and the sentence.”

— Marilyn Hacker

11. “Poetry seems to have been eliminated as a literary genre, and installed instead, as a kind of spiritual aerobic exercise – nobody need read it, but anybody can do it.”

— Marilyn Hacker

12. “Did you love well what you very soon left? Come home and take me in your arms and take away this stomach ache, headache, heartache.”

— Marilyn Hacker

13. “I crave uncomplicated quiet, and the sky.”

— Marilyn Hacker

14. “There is something very satisfactory about being in the middle of something.”

— Marilyn Hacker

15. “Community means people spending time together here, and I don’t think there’s really that.”

— Marilyn Hacker

16. “With, or despite our scars, we stay alive.”

— Marilyn Hacker

17. “Of the individual poems, some are more lyric and some are more descriptive or narrative. Each poem is fixed in a moment. All those moments written or read together take on the movement and architecture of a narrative.”

— Marilyn Hacker

18. “Perhaps first and foremost is the challenge of taking what I find as a reader and making it into a poem that, primarily, has to be a plausible poem in English.”

— Marilyn Hacker

19. “I try to write everyday. I do that much better over here than when I’m teaching. I always rewrite, usually fairly close-on which is to say first draft, then put it aside for 24 hours then more drafts.”

— Marilyn Hacker

20. “When I was in love with her, with a lover’s tendency to mythify the beloved did I know her better than I do now, when we know our limits? Now.”

— Marilyn Hacker

21. “We sometimes received – and I would read – 200 manuscripts a week. Some of them were wonderful, some were terrible; most were mediocre. It was like the gifts of the good and bad fairies.”

— Marilyn Hacker

22. “The pleasure that I take in writing gets me interested in writing a poem. It’s not a statement about what I think anybody else should be doing. For me, it’s an interesting tension between interior and exterior.”

— Marilyn Hacker

23. “The pull between sound and syntax creates a kind of musical tension in the language that interests me.”

— Marilyn Hacker

24. “The phenomenon of university creative writing programs doesn’t exist in France. The whole idea is regarded as a novelty, or an oddity.”

— Marilyn Hacker

25. “Paris is a wonderful city. I can’t say I belong to an especially anglophone community.”

— Marilyn Hacker

26. “I’ve been an inveterate reader of literary magazines since I was a teenager. There are always discoveries. You’re sitting in your easy chair, reading; you realize you’ve read a story or a group of poems four times, and you know, Yes, I want to go farther with this writer.”

— Marilyn Hacker

Featured in: Reading Quotes

27. “Given the devaluation of literature and of the study of foreign languages per se in the United States, as well as the preponderance of theory over text in graduate literature studies, creative writing programs keep literature courses populated.”

— Marilyn Hacker

28. “As a teacher you are more or less obliged to pay the same amount of attention to everything. That can wear you down.”

— Marilyn Hacker

29. “You are almost not free, if you are teaching a group of graduate students, to become friends with one of them. I don’t mean anything erotically charged, just a friendship.”

— Marilyn Hacker

30. “Clearly, once the student is no longer a student the possibilities of relationship are enlarged.”

— Marilyn Hacker

31. “Everyone thinks they’re going to write one book of poems or one novel.”

— Marilyn Hacker

32. “I don’t know whether a poem has be there to help to develop something. I think it’s there for itself, for what the reader finds in it.”

— Marilyn Hacker

33. “Translation makes me look at how a poem is put together in a different way, without the personal investment of the poem I’m writing myself, but equally closely technically.”

— Marilyn Hacker

34. “I don’t think it’s by accident that I was first attracted to translating two French women poets.”

— Marilyn Hacker

35. “I think there is something about coming to a city to work that puts you in touch with it in a different way.”

— Marilyn Hacker

36. “Poetry dovetails contradictions.”

— Marilyn Hacker

37. “Who gets to choose what battle takes her down?”

— Marilyn Hacker

38. “I worked at all kinds of jobs, mostly commercial editing.”

— Marilyn Hacker

39. “I started to send my work to journals when I was 26, which was just a question of when I got the courage up. They were mostly journals I had been reading for the previous six or seven years.”

— Marilyn Hacker

Featured in: Reading Quotes

40. “I wonder what it means about American literary culture and its transmission when I consider the number of American poets who earn their living teaching creative writing in universities. I’ve ended up doing that myself.”

— Marilyn Hacker