Garth Greenwell

“History is only ever invisible when it abets your sense of self, your desires, your ambitions, when it carries your life along in a kind of frictionless way.”

“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.”

“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.”