Brenda Shaughnessy > Quotes

“(from A Love Story, Eight Takes)


8


As it turns out, there is a wrong way to tell this story.

I was wrong to tell you how multi-true everything is,



when it would be truer to say nothing.

I've invented so much and prevented more.



But I'd like to talk with you about other things,

in absolute quiet. In extreme context.



To see you again, isn't love revision?

It could have gone so many ways.



This just one of the ways it went.

Tell me another.”
― Brenda Shaughnessy, Human Dark with Sugar

“I'm Perfect at Feelings,

so I have no problem telling you

why you cried over the third lost

metal or the mousetrap. I knew

that orgasms weren't your fault

and that feeling of keeping solid

in yourself but wanting an ecstatic

black hole was just bad beauty.



Certain loves were perfect

in the daytime and had every

right to express carnally behind

the copy machine and there are

no hard feelings for the boozy

sodomy and sorry XX daisy chain,

whenever it felt right for you.



And when the moment of soft

levitation with erasing hands

made you feel dirty, like

the main person to think up love

in the first place, I knew that.

It's okay, you're an innocent

with the brilliance of an animal

stuffing yourself sick on a kill.

Don't, don't feel like the runt alien

on my ship: I get you. I know

the dimensions of your wishing

and losing and don't think you

a glutton with petty beefs. But

even I, who know your triggers,



your emblematic sacs of sad fury,

I understand why the farthest fat trees

sliver down with your disappointment

and why the big sense of the world,

wrong before you, shrugs but

somewhere grasps your spinning,

stunning, alone. But you have me.”
― Brenda Shaughnessy, Human Dark with Sugar

“How anyone becomes herself/is a mystery.”
― Brenda Shaughnessy, Our Andromeda

“Where can we
go if not to each other,
resenting every step?”
― Brenda Shaughnessy, Our Andromeda

“Would I dance with you? Both forever and rather die. / It would be like dying, yes. Yes I would.”
― Brenda Shaughnessy, Interior with Sudden Joy: Poems

“All gifts are riddles, all lives/are in the middle of mother-lives.”
― Brenda Shaughnessy, Our Andromeda

“What if all possible
pain was only the grief of truth?”
― Brenda Shaughnessy, Our Andromeda

“I've been melted into something
too easy to spill. I make more
and more of myself in order

to make more and more of the baby.
He takes it, this making. And somehow
he's made more of me, too.”
― Brenda Shaughnessy, Our Andromeda

“Secret, smug believers! God never gives you
more than you can bear, they like to say, as if
the strong should be punished for their strength:

We can bear it. So we got it.
But what about my baby? How weak does
a newborn have to be to escape God's burdens?”
― Brenda Shaughnessy, Our Andromeda

“I do see the poet as someone whose role it is to push back against anti-intellectualism, anti-activism, and passivity in general. The purpose of this pushing back is to show that there are always infinite sides to a story, amazing unimagined perspectives on any narrative, and no limit to how weird and wild and unexpected our language and its meanings can get.”
― Brenda Shaughnessy

“If the two meanings of 'heart' are 'center' and 'part,' then the word 'art' also forms a perplexing doubleness: it is something human-made with materials; that is, it is made of us. Art is life. And yet it is distinct from 'life.' Art is life's counterpoint. We make it, and in that making, art is pointedly not life. It is just made of us.”
― Brenda Shaughnessy

“Isn’t blood a
woman’s ink?”
― Brenda Shaughnessy, So Much Synth

“It seems unlikely that so much literature
could be made from twenty-six letters.
Doesn't it seem it could all be boiled
down to one sentence?”
― Brenda Shaughnessy, Our Andromeda

“be strange to yourself
in your love, your grief”
― Brenda Shaughnessy, Our Andromeda

“Me exploding at my mother who explodes at me
because the explosion

of some dark star all the way back struck hard
at mother's mother's mother.”
― Brenda Shaughnessy

“When a woman you love hits you
on the head with a book
you love, is that love?”
― Brenda Shaughnessy

“And now we eat. The eponymous eating. Don't want butter, don't want salt. Dinner is thinner but it's not my fault.”
― Brenda Shaughnessy, The Octopus Museum

“I cling to this because to hope for this earth to go on after we're gone is the only kind of love left– the last good human piece of us.”
― Brenda Shaughnessy, The Octopus Museum

“Grilled peaches on shortbread with raspberries and black pepper ice cream.

We're all out, said the communicative waiter.

That was twelve years ago.”
― Brenda Shaughnessy, The Octopus Museum