Elizabeth Alexander > Quotes

“The story seems to begin with catastrophe but in fact began earlier and is not a tragedy but rather a love story. Perhaps tragedies are only tragedies in the presence of love, which confers meaning to loss. Loss is not felt in the absence of love.”
― Elizabeth Alexander, The Light of the World

“Poetry is what you find
in the dirt in the corner,

overhear on the bus, God
in the details, the only way

to get from here to there.”
― Elizabeth Alexander

“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final. Don’t let yourself lose me. Nearby is the country they call life. You will know it by its seriousness. Give me your hand.”
― Elizabeth Alexander, The Light of the World

“...now I know my capacity for awe
is infinite: this thirst is permanent,
the well bottomless, my good fortune vast.”
― Elizabeth Alexander

“Art replaces the light that is lost when the day fades, the moment passes, the evanescent extraordinary makes its quicksilver. Art tries to capture that which we know leaves us, as we move in and out of each other’s lives, as we all must eventually leave this earth. Great artists know that shadow, work always against the dying light, but always knowing that the day brings new light and that the ocean which washes away all traces on the sand leaves us a new canvas with each wave.”
― Elizabeth Alexander, The Light of the World

“What if the mightiest word is love, love beyond marital, filial, national. Love that casts a widening pool of light. Love with no need to preempt grievance.

In today's sharp sparkle, this winter air, anything can be made, any sentence begun.

On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp -- praise song for walking forward in that light.”
― Elizabeth Alexander

“I have not yet learned to use our television DVR. One of the points of marriage is that you split labor. In the olden days that meant one hunted and one gathered; now it means one knows where the tea-towels are kept and the other knows how to program the DVR, for why should we both have to know?”
― Elizabeth Alexander, The Light of the World

“friendship in marriage is its own thing: friendship in a cup of tea, or a glass of wine, or a cappuccino every Sunday morning. Friendship in buying undershirts and underpants. Friendship in picking up a prescription or rescuing the towed car. Friendship in waiting for the phone call after the mammogram. Friendship in toast buttered just so. Friendship in shoveling the snow. I am the one you want to tell. You are the one I want to tell.”
― Elizabeth Alexander

“In the absence of organized religion, faith abounds, in the form of song and art and food and strong arms.”
― Elizabeth Alexander, The Light of the World

“They shared an unshakeable belief in beauty, in overflow, in everythingness, the bursting, indelible beauty in a world where there is so much suffering and wounding and pain.”
― Elizabeth Alexander, The Light of the World

“It’s a fact: black people in this country die more easily, at all ages, across genders. Look at how young black men die, and how middle-aged black men drop dead, and how black women are ravaged by HIV/AIDS. The numbers graft to poverty but they also graph to stresses known and invisible. How did we come here, after all? Not with upturned chins and bright eyes but rather in chains, across a chasm. But what did we do? We built a nation, and we built its art.”
― Elizabeth Alexander, The Light of the World

“Using the voice is a physical act, one that first announces the existence of the body of residence and then trumpets its arrival in a public space.”
― Elizabeth Alexander, The Black Interior: Essays

“To live in memory and in dreams is a cruel comfort.”
― Elizabeth Alexander, The Light of the World

“For loss is our common denominator. None of us will escape it. None of us will outrun death. What do we do in the space between that is our lives? What is the quality and richness of our lives? How do we move through struggle and let community hold us when we have been laid low? This”
― Elizabeth Alexander, The Light of the World

“Loss is not felt in the absence of love.”
― Elizabeth Alexander, The Light of the World

“Poetry, I tell my students,
is idiosyncratic. Poetry
is where we are ourselves,
(though Sterling Brown said
"Every 'I' is a dramatic 'I'")
digging in the clam flats
for the shell that snaps,
emptying the proverbial pocketbook.
Poetry is what you find
in the dirt in the corner,
overhear on the bus, God
in the details, the only way
to get from here to there.
Poetry (and now my voice is rising)
is not all love, love, love
and I'm sorry the dog died.
Poetry (here I hear myself loudest)
is the human voice,
and are we not of interest to each other?”
― Elizabeth Alexander, American Sublime: Poems

“Each of us made it possible for the other. We got something done. Each believed in the other unsurpassingly.”
― Elizabeth Alexander, The Light of the World

“It happened; it is part of who we are; it is our beauty and our terror. We must be gleaners from what life has set before us.”
― Elizabeth Alexander, The Light of the World

“In all marriages there is struggle and ours was no different in that regard. But we always came to the other shore, dusted off, and said, There you are, my love.”
― Elizabeth Alexander

“Have you located your passion as if this was your last night on earth?”
― Elizabeth Alexander, The Light of the World

“Now I know for sure the soul is an evanescent thing and the body is its temporary container, because I saw it. I saw the body with the soul in it, I saw the body with the soul leaving, and I saw the body with the soul gone.”
― Elizabeth Alexander, The Light of the World

“Each of us made it possible for the other. We got something done. Each believed in the other unsurpassingly. In all marriages there is struggle and ours was no different in that regard. But we always came to the other shore, dusted off, and said, There you are, my love.”
― Elizabeth Alexander, The Light of the World

“Death comes with a gift in the poem; our loved ones tell us here that what we see with our eyes is different from what we know: “The things/themselves.” “Oh, at last” is the moment of exaltation in the poem. Lamentation and exaltation are simultaneous here.”
― Elizabeth Alexander, The Light of the World

“I been in sorrow’s kitchen and done licked out all the pots. Nobody knows the trouble I seen. Steal away to Jesus. I ain’t got long to stay here.”
― Elizabeth Alexander, The Light of the World

“Henry Ford believed the soul of a person is located in their last breath and so captured the last breath of his best friend Thomas Edison in a test tube and kept it evermore.”
― Elizabeth Alexander, The Light of the World

“I wake up grateful, for life is a gift.”
― Elizabeth Alexander, The Light of the World

“Perhaps tragedies are only tragedies in the presence of love, which confers meaning to loss.”
― Elizabeth Alexander, The Light of the World

“Flowers live, they are perfect and they affect us; they are God’s glory, they make us know why we are alive and human, that we behold. They are beautiful, and then they die and rot and go back to the earth that gave birth to them.”
― Elizabeth Alexander, The Light of the World

“My mother-in-law’s last night on earth, a fox crossed our path in Branford, Connecticut, as we left the hospice. We knew somehow that it was her, as I now know the ravenous hawk came to take Ficre. Do I believe that? Yes, I do. Poetic logic is my logic. I do not believe she was a fox. But I believe the fox was a harbinger. I believe that it was a strange enough occurrence that it should be heeded. Zememesh Berhe, the quick, red fox, soon passed from this life to the next.”
― Elizabeth Alexander, The Light of the World

“I believe by Elizabeth Alexander

Poetry, I tell my students,
is idiosyncratic. Poetry

is where we are ourselves,
(though Sterling Brown said

“Every ‘I’ is a dramatic ‘I’”)
digging in the clam flats

for the shell that snaps,
emptying the proverbial pocketbook.

Poetry is what you find
in the dirt in the corner,

overhear on the bus, God
in the details, the only way

to get from here to there.
Poetry (and now my voice is rising)

is not all love, love, love,
and I’m sorry the dog died.

Poetry (here I hear myself loudest)
is the human voice,

and are we not of interest to each other?”
― Elizabeth Alexander, American Sublime: Poems