Top 10 Quotes & Sayings by Lisel Mueller

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American poet Lisel Mueller.

Last updated on April 14, 2025.

Lisel Mueller was a German-born American poet, translator and academic teacher. Her family fled the Nazi regime, and she arrived in the U.S. in 1939 at the age of 15. She worked as a literary critic and taught at the University of Chicago, Elmhurst College and Goddard College. She began writing poetry in the 1950s and published her first collection in 1965, after years of self-study. She received awards including the National Book Award in 1981 and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1997, as the only German-born poet awarded that prize.

American - Poet

Source: Wikipedia

Well, language seems to be something that obsesses me. I'm always writing about it.

Lisel Mueller

Memory and poetry go together, absolutely. It is a matter of preserving and of remembering things.

Lisel Mueller

Everything is autobiography, even if one writes something that is totally objective. The fact that it's a subject that seizes you makes it autobiographical.

Lisel Mueller

Poetry, for me, is the answer to, 'How does one stay sane when private lives are being ransacked by public events?' It's something that hangs over your head all the time.

Lisel Mueller

I am imprinted with the whole sense of European history, especially German history, going back to World War I, which really destroyed all the old values and culture. My grandparents had been reasonably well-off but they became quite poor, living in an attic apartment.

Lisel Mueller

When I was in college, I did do some writing of poetry, somewhat inspired, I think at that time, by Carl Sandburg, because English was still relatively new to me, and Sandburg, of course, wrote in a very easy-to-understand, very colloquial and informal manner.

Lisel Mueller

How swiftly the strained honey of afternoon light flows into darkness and the closed bud shrugs off its special mystery in order to break into blossom: as if what exists, exists so that it can be lost and become precious

Lisel Mueller

What luxury, to be so happy that we can grieve over imaginary lives.

Lisel Mueller

I want to celebrate these elms which have been spared by the plague, these survivors of a once flourishing tribe commemorated by all the Elm Streets in America. But to celebrate them is to be silent about the people who sit and sleep underneath them, the homeless poor who are hauled away by the city like trash, except it has no place to dump them. To speak of one thing is to suppress another.

Lisel Mueller

When I am asked how I began writing poems, I talk about the indifference of nature.

Lisel Mueller

Top 10 Quotes & Sayings by Lisel Mueller

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