Quotes from Ada Limón

A horse gives way to another horse and then suddenly there are two horses, just like that. That's how I loved you.

It turns out poetry does, in fact, do the thing I want it to do… it helps me return to the world, to experience it, to pay attention.

It's been a long time since I've wanted to die, it makes me feel like taking off my skin suit and seeing how my light flies all on its own, neon and bouncy like a wannabe star.

How good it is to love live things, even when what they've done is terrible, how much we each want to be the pure exonerated creature, to be turned loose into out own wide open without a single harness of sin to stop us.

There is a solitude in this world I cannot pierce. I would die for it.

I'll never see you again, but that's a note I tear up in my mind.

You can't sum it up, my mother says as we are driving and the electronic voice repeats, Turn Left onto Wildwood Canyon Road, so I turn left, happy for the mundane instructions. Let us robot at once. Tell me where to go. Tell me how to get there. She means a life, of course. You cannot sum it up.

It wasn't until later, when I moved in with him and stood outside on our patchy imperfect lawn, that I remembered what had been circling in me: I am beautiful. I am full of love. I am dying.

I have always been too sensitive, a weeper from a long line of weepers. I am the hurting kind. I keep searching for proof.

I haven't given up on trying to live a good life, a really good one even

The other day someone I know posted a quote from the poet Mary Oliver, "Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?" And I almost began to cry. I kept thinking of how scared I've been, how scared many of us have been during these years of the pandemic. And of course, it's not just the pandemic, so many overwhelming fears. I read that quote and I suddenly longed for breath. For relief. For the end of fear.

You can't really stop going places because you're frightened.

Sometimes I think the memory of an event is better than the event itself.

Mercy is not frozen in time, but flits about frantically, unsure where to land.

I'm thirty-five and remember all that I've done wrong.

One question that I often get asked is how to overcome writer's block. And the funny thing is, I overcome it, by not overcoming it. I think it's okay to not write. I think it's okay not to talk, not to make, not to create, not to produce, produce, produce. How can we listen to the world if we are always talking to the world?

Perhaps we are hurtling our bodies towards the thing that will obliterate us, begging for love from the speeding passage of time...

Desire is a tricky thing, the boiling of the body's wants,

crossed-legged with my friend named Echo who taught me how to amplify the strange sound the frogs made by cupping my ears. I need to hold this close within me, when today's news is full of dead children, their faces opening their mouths for air that will not come. Once I was a child too and my friend and I sat for maybe an hour, eyes adjusting to the night sky, cupping and uncapping our ears to hear the song the tenderest animals made.

Not so much living, but a hovering without sense.

there was a gentleness to this, a long opening that seemed to join us in the saddest hour.

a clean honesty about our otherness that feels not like the moral but the story.

I once had a record of whale sounds, I swear I understood.

Darling Cockroaches of the Highest Order, hard underthings of hard underworlds, I am utterly suspicious of advice.