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Quote by Barbara Hamby

“I think it's really hard to be joyful. I work hard at it. I always feel like it's a choice. You can be joyful or you can be depressed, and there just doesn't seem to be any future in depression.”

Quote by Barbara Hamby

Author

Barbara Hamby, born in 1952, is an accomplished American poet known for her profound emotions and unique style in her poetry works. Her poetry has won the hearts of readers with its deep feelings and distinctive style. more

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“When I was a young woman, I had this friend who was really beautiful, and she would talk about how she was losing her looks, that she wasn't as pretty as she once was. She was gorgeous, and I thought, I'm going to stop this bad habit of self-criticism that I think a lot of women get into. You make a choice to be different.”

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“Suffering is always hard to quantify - especially when the pain is caused by as cruel a disease as Alzheimer's. Most illnesses attack the body; Alzheimer's destroys the mind - and in the process, annihilates the very self.”

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“I was born in New Orleans, but I grew up in Hawaii. That was a paradise. That's a paradise I keep inside of me all the time. It's funny, I don't really write too much in poetry about Hawaii, but I published a book of stories a couple of years ago.”

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“I've been writing fiction as long as I've been writing poetry. It's just that the poetry took off, and it took me a lot longer to figure out how to write a story.”

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“I guess it was easier for me to find my voice in poetry than it was in fiction. I'm working on fiction again, and I find it a lot more difficult. It's a struggle. At a certain point, you have your voice and you go to it every time, so it's not like reinventing the wheel. That's the way I see it at least.”

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“I know that one of the things that I really did to push myself was to write more formal poems, so I could feel like I was more of a master of language than I had been before. That was challenging and gratifying in so many ways. Then with these new poems, I've gone back to free verse, because it would be easy to paint myself into a corner with form. I saw myself becoming more opaque with the formal poems than I wanted to be. It took me a long time to work back into free verse again. That was a challenge in itself. You're always having to push yourself.”

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“Travel is something that I like to do because it gives you lots of images, and it also really makes you think about your own place in the world in a very different way.”

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“A number of artists have done things with Mickey Mouse - including Claes Oldenburg and Andy Warhol. He's such an American symbol, and such an anti-art symbol.”

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“I was at Rutgers University, and that was a center for Fluxus in a way. But it wasn't what I was interested in. All of it had an impact - as did happenings - because I could see that art was changing from expressionism, which I was doing at the time, or thought I was doing. But it wasn't the direction I really wanted to go.”

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“Everybody spoke English in my class, and they would turn to me and say, "What's going on in your country?" I would try to explain to Austrians, Poles, Australians, Israelis, Costa Ricans - people from all over the world - what was going on in our country. I would have to say, "I don't know what's going on, either. It's pretty evenly divided in our country. Sometimes one part's on top, and other times, the other faction is on top, and right now it's just crazy. We hate it as much as you do."”

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