Quotes from Ada Limón

Say we spend our last moments staring at each other, hands knotted together, clutching the dog, watching the sky burn. Say, It doesn't matter. Say, That would be enough. Say you'd still want this: us alive, right here, feeling lucky.

and I never knew survival was like that. If you live, you look back and beg for it again, the hazardous bliss before you know what you would miss.

My mother's psychic says, everyone essentially wants the same thing as everyone else, a sense of belonging, a coming home.

I am not obsessing. I am just sitting here perforating this post-it with a push-pin.

Even now, I don't know much about happiness. I still worry and want an endless stream of more, but some days I can see the point in growing something, even if it's just to say I cared enough.

I imagine the insides of myself sometimes-- part female, part male, part terrible dragon.

I will play on this blessed earth until I die.

Bellow "Tell the range and all that's howling, the flickers of life beyond the weeds, the vulture's furrowed brow of flight, the blasted sticky Canadian lawn thistle; tell the clowned-out clouds and the rain, and all that makes you go quiet again, tell them that you didn't come here to make a fuss, or break, or growl, or scream; tell them-crazy sky and stars between-tell them you didn't come to disturb the night air and throw a fit, then get down in the dark and do it.

what I have done is risked everything for that hour, that hour in the black night, where one flashing light looks like love, I have pulled over my body's car and let myself believe that the dance was only for me, that this gift of a breathing one-who-wants was always a gift, was the only sign worth stopping for, that the neon glow was a real star, gleaming in its dying, like us all, like us all.

But love is impossible and it goes on despite the impossible.

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

someone I could hold up to my ear and hear the ocean, something I could say my name into, and have it returned in the inky waves.

Will you tell us the stories that make us uncomfortable, but not complicit?

When the plane went down in San Francisco, I thought of my friend M. He's obsessed with plane crashes. He memorizes the wrecked metal details, the clear cool skies cut by black scars of smoke. Once, while driving, he told me about all the crashes: The one in blue Kentucky, in yellow Iowa. How people go on, and how people don't. It was almost a year before I learned that his brother was a pilot. I can't help it, I love the way men love.

Sometimes, you have to look around at the life you've made and sort of nod at it, like someone moving their head up and down to a tune they like.

If you live, you look back and beg for it again, the hazardous bliss before you know what you would miss.

I wanted to be a hummingbird. It made sense to long for rapid wings and the ability to hover always— to be Huitzilopochtli taming my snakes. Sometimes though, the thought exhausts me and I want to be a slow horse, a tennis shoe.

But what I forgot was that it was our plan, not hers, not the one doing the dying, this was a plan for those who still had a next. See, our job was simple: keep on living. Her job was harder, the hardest.

No one wants to be remembered for their death, or rather, I don't. So why do I remember hers and remember hers? I

Months later, when we went on our first date, I tried to seem put together, I wore a shawl she had given me. And her ring. I thought everything was behind me: death, and dying, and sickness. I didn't know I was changing my life— that I would have done anything, that what was left of me would become so ruthless to survive.

You're the muscle I cut from the bone and still the bone remembers, still it wants (so much, it wants) the flesh back, the real thing, if only to rail against it, if only to argue and fight, if only to miss a solve-able absence.

You say you love the world, so love the world.

I don't know how to hold this truth, so I kill it, pin its terrible wings down in case, later, no one believes me.

I am in no hurry to stop believing we are supposed to sway like this, that we too are immense and calling out.