Quotes from Ada Limón

There are so many people who've come before us, arrows and wagon wheels, obsidian tools, buffalo. Look out at the meadow, you can almost see them, generations dissolved in the bluegrass and hay. I want to try and be terrific. Even for an hour.

If we could light up the room with pain, we'd be such a glorious fire.

I imagine what it must be like to stay hidden, disappear in the dusky nothing and stay still in the night. It's not sadness, though it may sound like it. I'm thinking about people and trees and how I wish I could be silent more, be more tree than anything else, less clumsy and loud, less crow, more cool white pine, and how it's hard not to always want something else, not just to let the savage grass grow.

I remembered what had been circling in me: I am beautiful. I am full of love. I am dying.

I want to give you something, or I want to take something from you. But I want to feel the exchange, the warm hand on the shoulder, the song coming out and the ear holding onto it.

All night I dreamt of bonfires and burn piles and ghosts of men, and spirits behind those birds of flame. I cannot tell anymore when a door opens or closes, I can only hear the frame saying, Walk through.

Here it is: the new way of living with the world inside of us so we cannot lose it, and we cannot be lost.

People have done this before, but not us.

Look, we are not unspectacular things. We've come this far, survived this much. What would happen if we decided to survive more? To love harder?

What I didn't like was how people talked to me now that I was no longer single; they were nicer. Men who never looked at me would start up a conversation, like I was suddenly some safer form of fire.

All I've been working on is napping, and maybe being kinder to others, to myself.

I know you don't always understand, but let me point to the first wet drops landing on the stones, the noise like fingers drumming the skin. I can't help it. I will never get over making everything such a big deal.

I denied it, this new land. But love, I'll concede this: whatever state you are, I'll be that state's bird, the loud, obvious blur of song people point to when they wonder where it is you've gone.

What if, instead of carrying a child, I am supposed to carry grief?

I swear, I'll try harder not to miss as much: the tree, or how your fingers under still sleep-stunned sheets coaxed all my colors back.

Think crucial hanging. Think crayon orange. There is one low, leaning heart-shaped globe left and dearest, can you tell, I am trying to love you less.

Here is my sacrifice: my hummingbird landing in a stranger's palm.

Before, the only thing I was interested in was love, how it grips you, how it terrifies you, how it annihilates and resuscitates you. I didn't know then that it wasn't even love that I was interested in but my own suffering. I thought suffering kept things interesting. How funny that I called it love and the whole time it was pain.

I saw a mom take her raincoat off and give it to her young daughter when a storm took over the afternoon. My god, I thought, my whole life I've been under her raincoat thinking it was somehow a marvel that I never got wet.

Caring for each other is a form of radical survival that we don't always take into account.

dearest, can you tell, I am trying to love you less.

There remains the mystery of how the pupil devours so much bastard beauty. Abandoned property. This land and I are rewilding.

Isn't it funny? How the cold numbs everything but grief. If we could light up the room with pain, we'd be such a glorious fire.

this life is a fist of fast wishes caught by nothing but the fishhook of tomorrow's tug.