Alexandria Ryu > Quotes

“Passing by, the wind reads a gravestone: Here lies the free soul who was never tamed or caged or defined by a name, who never bought fame sacrificing her freedom.”
― Alexandria Ryu, Ink Garden: Poems

“Dropping unused clothes in the charity box, I think of the Tibetan children in tattered clothes with clear eyes. Do we need fancy clothes to hide our tattered souls? Some people don’t need luxury clothing.”
― Alexandria Ryu, Ink Garden: Poems

“In June, days and nights chase one another.”
― Alexandria Ryu, Ink Garden: Poems

“I go to India. I go to the land of the people who say their own words and believe in their own gods. Worrying I might bother them with my second-vertebra-broken, quadriplegic soul clad in rags called modernity, I go past the Karakoram Highway into the scent of Ayurveda.”
― Alexandria Ryu, Ink Garden: Poems

“On the day I lose my phone, I decide to live à la Ladakh: write a letter on paper, go to the post office, wait for his reply for a long time, appreciate a meal a day and a few clothes, be grateful for having been born as a human, read the Tibetan Book of the Dead, buy vegetables from an old street vendor, and save a bee’s life. On the day I lose my wallet, I decide to live à la Ladakh: plant a seed, wait for a long time, and share the fruit with a worm.”
― Alexandria Ryu, Ink Garden: Poems

“He keeps silent for several seasons. In my mind, hundreds of questions that I don’t ask. Instead, I go to Machu Picchu, explore the Amazon rainforest, and stay in Marrakech. I return to my own life before love. I go back to my twenty-year-old self, plan my life again, keep an ambitious dream, and become stronger and wiser. But at times, I still write letters that I never send to him. That his silence is”
― Alexandria Ryu, Ink Garden: Poems

“Like the yaks that never leave their Himalayan homeland, wolves stay in the forest, the feral forest. People who became dogs only remember the forest they left when they are castrated and discarded. I should head for the forest, into the scent of wild grass. … There, I will rise when the sun rises, fall asleep when the sun sets, and gaze at the dewdrops forming and evaporating very slowly.”
― Alexandria Ryu, Ink Garden: Poems

“When universes disappear every minute, when I go back to silence.”
― Alexandria Ryu, Ink Garden: Poems

“Maybe it’s right. Maybe we have abandoned the path. For we no longer hear what morning tells us, what summer tells us, what our hearts tell us,”
― Alexandria Ryu, Ink Garden: Poems