"New York was fun as a kid. I loved to go walking. It was an adventure. I remember throwing my retainer into a garbage can one time and my mom yelling, "Get your ass over here now!" And I had to dig through the garbage and find my retainer."

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I am attracted to looking at the different things language can mean even in one sometimes quite ordinary utterance. Writing is partly about listening closely to yourself as you think or compose and being aware of the different tensions and weights among the words, the different directions any one of them could lead. I like to play with the multiplicity and instability of meaning partly out of a sense of adventure, to see where that takes me and partly in a whistling past the graveyard kind of way because, of course, sensing stable meaning fall away can be scary.

— Rae Armantrout