Garth Greenwell Quotes

You can't speak to him, he said, if you speak to him, if you give any sign to him at all, he will come back; he has to stop existing for you.

the whole point of literature, I think, is that it’s the best technology we have for communicating what another person’s life feels like from the inside.

[L]ike poems, cruising carves privacy out of public spaces. Poems are a kind of private communication that occurs in public speech. And I think cruising is that too: a training in reading occult codes; a way of seeing a significance in the world that most people don’t see.

Poetry never makes any money, and so there's no pressure to appeal to an audience. That makes a lot of things about being a poet difficult, but it also means freedom to write whatever you want to write, however you want to write it.