Top 35 Quotes & Sayings by Rachel Zucker

Lizzie Harris's Stop Wanting is an unflinching book about a girlhood filled with violence, doubt, vulnerability, and loss. These gorgeously crafted and hauntingly memorable poems are a bleak place full of life, prayer, and the kind of answers only poems like these can provide.

I don't write very much about penises. More than some poets but not perhaps as much as I should.

I don't remember ever dressing up for Halloween but I must have. I do not like dressing up at all.

One of my greatest anxieties as a mother is head injuries.

Very little of my time is spent thinking about poetry, except the time I spend in class.

I'm fascinated by but afraid of animals.

I was not popular enough - or at all - when Vanilla Ice was popular to remember who Vanilla Ice is without my husband reminding me. So I don't have a Vanilla Ice key chain.

I do not like candy. I do not like knocking on strangers' doors. I do not like having to deal with the candy disaster that is Halloween. I resent it.

I am only able to be honest. And sometimes my view of the world is pretty dark. But still funny.

When I edit the poems - and I do edit, which some people don't mean when they use the term "stream of consciousness" - I'm usually editing toward greater accuracy, which sometimes means more fragmentation, because that is the way I think.

I think humor and terror are very closely related.

I have a complicated relationship with non-human animals. I've never really been close to one.

I love it when artists talk about process! I love the movie Comedian.

I do not like it when other people dress up. I like everyone to be THEMSELVES.

Writing on the subway or anywhere is writing. Maybe it's all just writing.

I almost never do free writing. Unless I am forcing my students to do it.

I agree that comedy does a good job - and is often about - stepping over the line - Lenny Bruce, etc. - and that this is important for a lot of poets too. I guess I feel like there has to be depth.

I really, really fear head injuries. But when people hit their heads in movies or fall down - I can't stop laughing.

I'm even afraid of kittens. They bite too! But I respect animals.

I think it's a huge shortcoming of mine - this disconnect between the world of human and animals. We are animals.

I am interested in the movement of my own thoughts and in trying make the poems feel more accurate to experience, including the experience of thinking.

I'm interested in the self. And in the limits and transformations of self. And in self presentation. And in doubt. And in playing with the audience's expectations. But I don't like dressing up like on Halloween.

In high school my mother advised me to make my last lines into titles. It was very good advice.

I have a longing for wilderness and for greenness. I wish I were a person who longed for animals, but I'm not.

I love food too much - not because I'm fat but because it's so consumptionistic, etc.

I'm in a hard place now. A very silent place. And I'm struggling to either accept this or drag myself out of it.

It's hard for me to find humor in my current non-writing situation.

Penises are literally all around me all the time, and have a lot of influence on the world, on my world.

I love narrative and sometimes I feel frustrated with stand-up.

Halloween means that young girls dress up in highly sexualized outfits that would never be acceptable if it weren't Halloween.

I like the way the prose and poetry interact.

I HATE HALLOWEEN. This makes me VERY unpopular.

Humor is essential to survival. Funny poems are vastly underrated. Very underwritten.

Usually I avoid sugar, but sugar is like the most deeply satisfying addictive thing ever.

My poetry definitely comes out of a female body.