Rachel Marie Kang > Quotes

“In the beautiful words of Lore Wilbert Ferguson: Tell me, I want to say to my fellow writers, tell me of your inner demons, tell me of your flesh. I want to hear the war that waged within you as you navigated complex stories and spaces. I want to know how hard you fought and how much you wept and how little you prayed. Tell it honest, tell it slant, tell it however you want to, but tell the truth because the truth is ten thousand little protests that got you where you are and every one of them matters to God and to me and even to you because there you are and there you were all along.5”
― Rachel Marie Kang, Let There Be Art: The Pleasure and Purpose of Unleashing the Creativity within You

“Poetry reminds us that we are not alone, that we have never been alone, and that we will never be alone. It offers a sort of communion, a kind space to share with someone. It is a humble form of hospitality, of swinging wide open the door of your soul, as if to say the things that confess that state of your soul. It is an invitation. It is a welcome. It is home.”
― Rachel Marie Kang, Let There Be Art

“It isn’t futile and it isn’t fruitless to be fascinated with fiction in the way that you are. It isn’t weird and it isn’t a waste of time to fall in love with the characters in books you read or the shows you watch. These characters are teaching you something about loss, about love. They are teaching you something about living in light and pushing back the dark.”
― Rachel Marie Kang, Let There Be Art

“We can learn again to live creatively and artfully by looking to the things that give us breath and take our breath away.”
― Rachel Marie Kang, Let There Be Art

“Art, not as a way of claiming that we are right about anything, but art as a way of climbing back toward the light. Yes, art as a way of pushing back the darkness within ourselves, within our world.”
― Rachel Marie Kang, Let There Be Art

“. . . what I could never do-- is to attempt to put a definitive grasp on grief. Grief cannot be quantified. . .”
― Rachel Marie Kang, Matter of Little Losses: Finding Grace to Grieve the Big (and Small) Things

“Brokenness wasn’t our beginning. We began as breath bound to the heartbeat of God. We were not damned from the beginning. Darkness was. We were not bad and broken from the beginning. We were believed in from the beginning.”
― Rachel Marie Kang, Let There Be Art

“What if we saw our grief as gardening?”
― Rachel Marie Kang, Matter of Little Losses: Finding Grace to Grieve the Big (and Small) Things

“We can be nomads in our own narrative, can feel like a stranger in our own story, just stopping by and traveling through, forever looking for something we feel we will not and cannot ever find. This sense of placelessness has everything to do with personhood, has everything to do with the ways our lives will project forward—who we will become and why. We are, all of us, trying to go back to the backyards where we learned to throw baseballs, the kitchens where we learned how to cook.

We are trying to get back to the fields our families farmed, the ancient recipes and remedies, hoping to know what we need to make the soups and sauces. We search for bloodlines lost in map lines, the immigrant story of coming to a new land only to find ourselves missing the old one. Generations stretch out, longer and farther from our place of origin, straining and stretching to hold on to who we are. But the currents of change are strong, washing it all away in the waters of time.”
― Rachel Marie Kang, Matter of Little Losses: Finding Grace to Grieve the Big (and Small) Things

“My hope is that these poetic pauses help you open your heart to feel all that stirs within.”
― Rachel Marie Kang, Matter of Little Losses: Finding Grace to Grieve the Big (and Small) Things

“We can be nomads in our own narrative, can feel like a stranger in our own story, just stopping by and traveling through, forever looking for something we feel we will not and cannot ever find. This sense of placelessness has everything to do with personhood, has everything to do with the ways our lives will project forward—who we will become and why. We
are, all of us, trying to go back to the backyards
where we learned to throw baseballs, the kitchens where we learned how to cook.

We are trying to get back to the fields our families farmed, the ancient recipes and remedies, hoping to know what we need to make the soups and sauces. We search for bloodlines lost in map lines, the immigrant story of coming to a new land only to find ourselves missing the old one. Generations stretch out, longer and farther from our place of origin, straining and stretching to hold on to who we are. But the currents of change are strong, washing it all away in the waters of time.”
― Rachel Marie Kang, Matter of Little Losses: Finding Grace to Grieve the Big (and Small) Things

“To live at all is to survive loss, and to grieve loss is to deeply need grace.”
― Rachel Marie Kang, Matter of Little Losses: Finding Grace to Grieve the Big (and Small) Things

“Grief comes to us in all shapes, knocking down doors of all sizes, the unanticipated guest that it is. We lose life, lose livelihood. Dreams die and bodies deteriorate with disease. Wedding bands go missing and houses fold in foreclosure. We hold our breath waiting for the bad news, waiting to hear that the world will be ripped from under our feet. We, all of us, cradle unnamed grief, crying into corners when the world isn’t looking as we wait for someone—anyone—to say it’s not too much to want to make sense of it all.”
― Rachel Marie Kang, Matter of Little Losses: Finding Grace to Grieve the Big (and Small) Things

“Grief undulates, slips thin like air in and through heart, body, and soul. It moves unnamed, unknown. A fleeting thing that is, for better or worse, forever here to stay.

What this book does not do—and what I could never do—is attempt to put a definitive grasp on grief. Grief cannot be quantified; it swells and looms large, only to shrivel and hide when sought out and sized. Grief is one thing to one person and presents a whole new face to another. It is emotion and embodied; it is expressed and it emits. It is body, spirit, mind, and soul. Hidden and seen. Felt and perceived.

It is no one thing, for it is everything and everywhere all at once. It is in and around me. And—whether you feel it, fight it, or fear it—grief is in and around you too.”
― Rachel Marie Kang, Matter of Little Losses: Finding Grace to Grieve the Big (and Small) Things

“You are not just a body of bones and blood and breath, you are a heart bending to hear, you are a soul straining to see something beautiful in the midst of all that breaks.”
― Rachel Marie Kang, Let There Be Art

“In the chasm of all that is unsaid, there are miles of misunderstandings. . .”
― Rachel Marie Kang, Matter of Little Losses: Finding Grace to Grieve the Big (and Small) Things

“We weep, always, for the hundreds of ways loss lingers in our world.”
― Rachel Marie Kang, Matter of Little Losses: Finding Grace to Grieve the Big (and Small) Things