Life & Wisdom Quote by Marilyn Hacker

Marilyn Hacker’s line has the offhand precision of someone used to being misread by paperwork. On the surface it’s a small autobiographical knot - she lived in a place before she “bought” it - but the sentence is really about how life, especially a working writer’s life, rarely fits the clean chronology demanded by institutions. The timeline loops because the lived fact came first; ownership arrives later, almost as an afterthought, like the state catching up to reality.

The subtext is class and stability, said without melodrama. A studio apartment is intimate, constrained, unglamorous. Staying put for decades sounds like rootedness, but Hacker frames it as something earned and managed: she occupied the space, then secured it, then kept the address and phone number like hard-won continuity. In a culture that treats mobility as success and reinvention as virtue, the insistence on sameness reads as quiet resistance. It’s also a poet’s sense of how an “address” is both literal and existential: where you can be reached, where you can return to yourself.

Context matters: buying property in 1989, after living there since 1985, nods to an era of urban real-estate churn, gentrification pressures, and the precarious economics of artistic labor. The clipped, almost bureaucratic phrasing (“address and phone number”) doubles as a small manifesto: identity isn’t the brand-new self; it’s the long-held line that still connects.