Ada Limon > Quotes

“I'm learning so many different ways to be quiet. There's how I stand in the lawn, that's one way. There's also how I stand in the field across from the street, that's another way because I'm farther from people and therefore more likely to be alone. There's how I don't answer the phone, and how I sometimes like to lie down on the floor in the kitchen and pretend I'm not home when people knock. There's daytime silent where I stare, and a nighttime silent when I do things. There's shower silent and bath silent and California silent and Kentucky silent and car silent and then there's the silence that comes back, a million times bigger than me, sneaks into my bones and wails and wails and wails until I can't be quiet anymore. That's how this machine works.”
― Ada Limon, Bright Dead Things

“I imagine what it must be like to stay hidden, disappear in the dusky nothing and stay still in the night. It’s not sadness, though it may sound like it. I’m thinking about people and trees and how I wish I could be silent more, be more tree than anything else, less clumsy and loud, less crow, more cool white pine, and how it’s hard not to always want something else, not just to let the savage grass grow.”
― Ada Limon, Bright Dead Things

“If we could light up the room with pain,
we’d be such a glorious fire.”
― Ada Limon, Bright Dead Things

“I remembered what had been circling in me: I am beautiful. I am full of love. I am dying.”
― Ada Limon, Bright Dead Things

“There are so many people who’ve come before us,
arrows and wagon wheels, obsidian tools, buffalo.
Look out at the meadow, you can almost see them,
generations dissolved in the bluegrass and hay.
I want to try and be terrific. Even for an hour.”
― Ada Limón, Bright Dead Things

“I want to give you something, or I want to take something from you. But I want to feel the exchange, the warm hand on the shoulder, the song coming out and the ear holding onto it.”
― Ada Limon, Bright Dead Things

“Look, we are not unspectacular things. We’ve come this far, survived this much. What would happen if we decided to survive more? To love harder?”
― Ada Limon, The Carrying: Poems

“Here it is:
the new way of living with the world

inside of us so we cannot lose it,
and we cannot be lost.”
― Ada Limon, Bright Dead Things

“All night I dreamt of bonfires and burn piles
and ghosts of men, and spirits
behind those birds of flame.

I cannot tell anymore when a door opens or closes,
I can only hear the frame saying, Walk through.”
― Ada Limon

“Before, the only thing I was interested in was love, how it grips you, how it terrifies you, how it annihilates and resuscitates you. I didn’t know then that it wasn’t even love that I was interested in but my own suffering. I thought suffering kept things interesting. How funny that I called it love and the whole time it was pain.”
― Ada Limon, The Hurting Kind: Poems

“I like the lady horses best,
how they make it all look easy,
like running 40 miles per hour
is as fun as taking a nap, or grass.
I like their lady horse swagger,
after winning. Ears up, girls, ears up!
But mainly, let’s be honest, I like
that they’re ladies. As if this big
dangerous animal is also a part of me,
that somewhere inside the delicate
skin of my body, there pumps
an 8-pound female horse heart,
giant with power, heavy with blood.
Don’t you want to believe it?
Don’t you want to lift my shirt and see
the huge beating genius machine
that thinks, no, it knows,
it’s going to come in first.”
― Ada Limon, Bright Dead Things

“What if, instead of carrying

a child, I am supposed to carry grief?”
― Ada Limon, The Carrying

“People have done this before, but not us.”
― Ada Limon, Bright Dead Things

“All I’ve been working on is napping, and maybe being kinder to others, to myself.”
― Ada Limon, The Carrying

“What I didn't like was how people talked to me
now that I was no longer single; they were nicer.

Men who never looked at me would start up a conversation,
like I was suddenly some safer form of fire.”
― Ada Limon, Bright Dead Things

“I know
you don’t always understand,
but let me point to the first
wet drops landing on the stones,
the noise like fingers drumming
the skin. I can’t help it. I will
never get over making everything
such a big deal.”
― Ada Limon, The Carrying

“When the plane went down in San Francisco,
I thought of my friend M. He’s obsessed with plane crashes.

He memorizes the wrecked metal details,
the clear cool skies cut by black scars of smoke.

Once, while driving, he told me about all the crashes:
The one in blue Kentucky, in yellow Iowa.

How people go on, and how people don’t.

It was almost a year before I learned
that his brother was a pilot.

I can’t help it,
I love the way men love.”
― Ada Limon, Bright Dead Things

“I saw a mom take her raincoat off
and give it to her young daughter when
a storm took over the afternoon. My god,
I thought, my whole life I’ve been under her
raincoat thinking it was somehow a marvel
that I never got wet.”
― Ada Limon, The Carrying

“I'm thirty-five and remember all that I've done wrong.”
― Ada Limon, Bright Dead Things

“I denied it,
this new land. But love, I’ll concede this:
whatever state you are, I’ll be that state’s bird,
the loud, obvious blur of song people point to
when they wonder where it is you’ve gone.”
― Ada Limon, Bright Dead Things

“I swear, I’ll try harder not to miss as much: the tree, or how your fingers under still sleep-stunned sheets coaxed all my colors back.”
― Ada Limon, Bright Dead Things: Poems

“Isn't it funny? How the cold numbs everything
but grief.
If we could light up the room with pain,
we'd be such a
glorious fire.”
― Ada Limon, Bright Dead Things

“Think crucial hanging.
Think crayon orange.
There is one low, leaning
heart-shaped globe left
and dearest, can you
tell, I am trying
to love you less.”
― Ada Limon

“Every time I’m in an airport,
I think I should drastically
change my life: Kill the kid stuff,
start to act my numbers, set fire
to the clutter and creep below
the radar like an escaped canine
sneaking along the fence line.
I’d be cable-knitted to the hilt,
beautiful beyond buying, believe
in the maker and fix my problems
with prayer and property.
Then, I think of you, home
with the dog, the field full
of purple pop-ups—we’re small
and flawed, but I want to be
who I am, going where
I’m going, all over again.”
― Ada Limon, Bright Dead Things

“Say we spend our last moments staring
at each other, hands knotted together,
clutching the dog, watching the sky burn.
Say, It doesn’t matter. Say, That would be
enough. Say you’d still want this: us alive,
right here, feeling lucky.”
― Ada Limon, Bright Dead Things

“Caring for each other is a form of radical survival that we don't always take into account.”
― Ada Limon

“Here is my sacrifice: my hummingbird landing in a stranger’s palm.”
― Ada Limon

“There remains the mystery of how the pupil devours so much bastard beauty. Abandoned property.

This land and I are rewilding.”
― Ada Limon, Bright Dead Things

“...this life is a fist
of fast wishes caught by nothing
but the fishhook of tomorrow's tug.”
― Ada Limon, Bright Dead Things

“I imagine the insides of myself sometimes--
part female, part male, part terrible dragon.”
― Ada Limon, Bright Dead Things