and I said to the star, 'Consume me.'
here are some lines i’ve been carrying around/tweeting out/wanting to write in response to ::
To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.
—Emily Dickinson (need to track down the source for this one!)
*
New Year’s Day—
everything is in blossom!
I feel about average.
—Issa, trans. Robert Hass (from The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa)
*
My truest life is unrecognizable, extremely interior and there is not a single word that defines it.
—Clarice Lispector, trans. Giovanni Pontiero (from The Hour of the Star)
*
Last night, staring at the green planet, I wanted to say everything. That's not it either. A brush. This wrist. These shoulder blades. I write because I cannot paint.
—Bhanu Kapil, from The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers
*
I wish I could protect you from anyone who do not see you as I do.
—Sarah Gambito, from “Baby Alive” (in Loves You)
*
I spent the whole day
crying and writing, until
they became the same,
as when the planet covers the sun
with all its might and still
I can see it, or when one dead
body gives its heart
to a name on a list.
—Brenda Shaughnessy, from “Miracles” (in Our Andromeda)
*
I have flipped through books, reading hundreds of opening and closing lines, across ages, across cultures, across aesthetic schools, and I have discovered that first lines are remarkably similar, even repeated, and that last lines are remarkably similar, even repeated. Of course in all cases they remain remarkably distinct, because the words belong to completely different poems. And I began to realize, reading these first and last lines, that there are not only the first and last lines of the lifelong sentence we each speak but also the first and last lines of the long piece of language delivered to us by others, by those we listen to. And in the best of all possible lives, that beginning and that end are the same: in poem after poem I encountered words that we hear as children repeated night after night, like a refrain: I love you. I am here with you. Don’t be afraid. Go to sleep now. And I encountered words that mark the last something made out of language that we hope to hear on earth: I love you. You are not alone. Don’t be afraid. Go to sleep now.
—Mary Ruefle, from “On Beginnings” (in Madness, Rack, & Honey)
*
A desire for a more normal life does not necessarily mean identification with norms, but can be simply this: a desire to escape the exhaustion of having to insist just to exist.
—Sara Ahmed, from Willful Subjects
*
Watch your mind. Without training it might run away and leave your heart for the immense human feast set by the thieves of time.
—Joy Harjo, from “For Calling the Spirit Back from Wandering the Earth in its Human Feet” (in Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings)
*
Our notions about happiness entrap us. We forget that they are just ideas. Our idea of happiness can prevent us from actually being happy. We fail to see the opportunity for joy that is right in front of us when we are caught in a belief that happiness should take a particular form.
—Thich Nhat Hanh
*
Listen to me. I am telling you
a true thing. This is the only kingdom.
The kingdom of touching;
the touches of the disappearing, things.
—Aracelis Girmay, from “Elegy” (in Kingdom Animalia)
*
The poem carries love and terror, or it carries nothing.
—Jane Hirshfield, from “Like an Ant Carrying Her Bits of Leaf or Sand” (in Each Happiness Ringed by Lions: Selected Poems)
*
I mean, you must take living so seriously
that even at seventy, for example, you'll plant olive trees—
and not for your children, either,
but because although you fear death you don't believe it,
because living, I mean, weighs heavier.
—Nazim Hikmet, from "On Living,” trans. Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk (in Poems of Nazim Hikmet)
*
motion: that which refuses to be annihilated
—Myung Mi Kim, from Commons
*
repetition is holy
—Nikky Finney, from her acceptance speech for the National Book Award for Poetry
*
And a softness came from the starlight and filled me full to the bone.
—W.B. Yeats, from “The Wanderings of Oisin”
*
There are dreams we dream alone.
There are dreams we dream with others.
—Li-Young Lee, from “The Undressing” (in The Undressing)
*
I have lost myself in the sea many times
with my ear full of freshly cut flowers,
with my tongue full of love and agony.
—Federico García Lorca, excerpt of “Gacela De La Huida,” trans. Stephen Spender and J. L. Gili
*
You remember too much,
my mother said to me recently.
Why hold onto all that? And I said,
Where can I put it down?
—Anne Carson, from "The Glass Essay" (in Glass, Irony, & God)
*
and I said to the star, 'Consume me.'
—Virginia Woolf, with the one true mood (from The Waves)