Ross Gay > Quotes

“Because in trying to articulate what, perhaps, joy is, it has occurred to me that among other things—the trees and the mushrooms have shown me this—joy is the mostly invisible, the underground union between us, you and me, which is, among other things, the great fact of our life and the lives of everyone and thing we love going away. If we sink a spoon into that fact, into the duff between us, we will find it teeming. It will look like all the books ever written. It will look like all the nerves in a body. We might call it sorrow, but we might call it a union, one that, once we notice it, once we bring it into the light, might become flower and food. Might be joy.”
― Ross Gay, The Book of Delights: Essays

“I suppose I could spend time theorizing how it is that people are not bad to each other, but that’s really not the point. The point is that in almost every instance of our lives, our social lives, we are, if we pay attention, in the midst of an almost constant, if subtle, caretaking. Holding open doors. Offering elbows at crosswalks. Letting someone else go first. Helping with the heavy bags. Reaching what’s too high, or what’s been dropped. Pulling someone back to their feet. Stopping at the car wreck, at the struck dog. The alternating merge, also known as the zipper. This caretaking is our default mode and it’s always a lie that convinces us to act or believe otherwise. Always.”
― Ross Gay, The Book of Delights: Essays

“It didn’t take me long to learn that the discipline or practice of writing these essays occasioned a kind of delight radar. Or maybe it was more like the development of a delight muscle. Something that implies that the more you study delight, the more delight there is to study.”
― Ross Gay, The Book of Delights: Essays

“The more stuff you love the happier you will be.”
― Ross Gay, The Book of Delights: Essays

“Is sorrow the true wild?
And if it is—and if we join them—your wild to mine—what’s that?
For joining, too, is a kind of annihilation. What if we joined our sorrows, I’m saying. I’m saying: What if that is joy?”
― Ross Gay, The Book of Delights: Essays

“As I write this it’s occurring to me that the books I most adore are the ones that archive the people who have handled them—dogears, or old receipts used as bookmarks (always a lovely digression). Underlines and exclamation points, and this in an old library book! The tender vandalisms by which, sometimes, we express our love.”
― Ross Gay, The Book of Delights: Essays

“one of life’s true delights is casting about in bed, drifting in and out of dream, as the warm hand of the sun falls through the blinds, moving ever so slowly across your body.”
― Ross Gay, The Book of Delights: Essays

“what happens if joy is not separate from pain? What if joy and pain are fundamentally tangled up with one another? Or even more to the point, what if joy is not only entangled with pain, or suffering, or sorrow, but is also what emerges from how we care for each other through those things? What if joy, instead of refuge or relief from heartbreak, is what effloresces from us as we help each other carry our heartbreaks?”
― Ross Gay, Inciting Joy: Essays

“Among the most beautiful things I've ever heard anyone say came from my student Bethany, talking about her pedagogical aspirations or ethos, how she wanted to be as a teacher, and what she wanted her classrooms to be: "What if we joined our wildernesses together?" Sit with that for a minute. That the body, the life, might carry a wilderness, an unexpected territory, and that yours and mine might somewhere, somehow, meet. Might, even, join.
And what if the wilderness - perhaps the densest wild in there - thickets, bogs, swamps, uncrossable ravines and rivers (have I made the metaphor clear?) - is our sorrow? Or... the 'intolerable.' It astonishes me sometimes - no, often - how every person I get to know - everyone, regardless of everything, by which I mean everything - lives with some profound personal sorrow... Everyone, regardless, always, of everything. Not to mention the existential sorrow we all might be afflicted with, which is that we, and what we love, will soon be annihilated. Which sounds more dramatic than it might. Let me just say dead. Is this, sorrow, of which our impending being no more might be the foundation, the great wilderness?
Is sorrow the true wild?
And if it is - and if we join them - your wild to mine - what's that?
For joining, too, is a kind of annihilation.
What if we joined our sorrow, I'm saying.
I'm saying: What if that is joy?”
― Ross Gay, The Book of Delights: Essays

“I suspect it is simply a feature of being an adult, what I will call being grown, or a grown person, to have endured some variety of thorough emotional turmoil, to have made your way to the brink, and, if you’re lucky, to have stepped back from it—if not permanently, then for some time, or time to time. Then it is, too, a kind of grownness by which I see three squares of light on my wall, the shadow of a tree trembling in two of them, and hear the train going by and feel no panic or despair, feel no sense of condemnation or doom or horrible align- ment, but simply observe the signs—light and song—for what they are—light and song. And, knowing what I have felt before, and might feel again, feel a sense of relief, which is cousin to, or rather, water to, delight.”
― Ross Gay, The Book of Delights: Essays

“A good little bookstore…is a laboratory for our coming together.”
― Ross Gay

“I came up with a handful of rules: write a delight every day for a year; begin and end on my birthday, August 1; draft them quickly; and write them by hand. The rules made it a discipline for me. A practice. Spend time thinking and writing about delight every day.”
― Ross Gay, The Book of Delights: Essays

“I have no children of my own, but I love a lot of kids and love a lot of people with kids, who, it seems to me, are in constant communion with terror, and that terror exists immediately beside . . . let’s here call it delight—different from pleasure, connected to joy, Zadie Smith’s joy, somehow—terror and delight sitting next to each other, their feet dangling off the side of a bridge very high up.”
― Ross Gay, The Book of Delights: Essays

“I've completed another year of delights. Or maybe I should say another year of delights has completed me.”
― Ross Gay, The Book of (More) Delights: Essays

“DO NOT READ THIS,” which strikes me as an invitation, if not a command, to read this.”
― Ross Gay, The Book of Delights: Essays

“This morning I was walking through Manhattan, head down, checking directions, when I looked up to see a fruit truck selling lychee, two pounds for five bucks, and I had ten bucks in my pocket! Then while buying my bus ticket for later that evening I witnessed the Transbridge teller’s face soften after she had endured a couple unusually rude interactions in front of me as I kept eye contact and thanked her. She called me honey first (delight), baby second (delight), and almost smiled before I turned away. On my way to the Flatiron building there was an aisle of kousa dogwood—looking parched, but still, the prickly knobs of fruit nestled beneath the leaves. A cup of coffee from a well-shaped cup. A fly, its wings hauling all the light in the room, landing on the porcelain handle as if to say, “Notice the precise flare of this handle, as though designed for the romance between the thumb and index finger that holding a cup can be.” Or the peanut butter salty enough. Or the light blue bike the man pushed through the lobby. Or the topknot of the barista. Or the sweet glance of the man in his stylish short pants (well-lotioned ankles gleaming beneath) walking two little dogs. Or the woman stepping in and out of her shoe, her foot curling up and stretching out and curling up.”
― Ross Gay, The Book of Delights: Essays

“But when we allow and expect each other to change and, even more to the point, when we witness the learning, the changing, the grieving, with curiosity and patience and care and love; when we make room for and witness and invite each other's unfixing and so are unfixing ourselves; when we join the grieving, or when we join in grieving, and when we do it again and again, making of that soft, mutual, curious, groundless witnessing not only an endeavor, but also a practice (we're talking about practice again); when we do these things, we fall apart into one another. We fall into each other.”
― Ross Gay, Inciting Joy: Essays

“grief is the metabolization of change.”
― Ross Gay, Inciting Joy: Essays

“...which is simply called sharing what we love, what we find beautiful, which is an ethics.”
― Ross Gay, The Book of Delights: Essays

“The luminous, mycelial tethers between us, our fundamental connection to one another, the raft through the sorrow, the holding through the grief joy is, reminds us, again and again, that we belong not to an institution or a party or a state or a market, but to each other. Needfully so.”
― Ross Gay, Inciting Joy: Essays

“Susan Sontag said somewhere something like any technology that slows us down in our writing rather than speeding us up is the one we ought to use.”
― Ross Gay, The Book of Delights: Essays

“I suppose I could spend time theorizing how it is that people are not bad to each other, but that's really not the point. The point is that in almost every instance of our lives, our social lives, we are, if we pay attention, in the midst of an almost constant, if subtle, caretaking. Holding open doors. Offering elbows at crosswalks. Letting someone else go first. Helping with the heavy bags. Reaching what's too high, or what's been dropped. Pulling someone back to their feet. Stopping at the car wreck, at the struck dog. That alternating merge, also known as the zipper. This caretaking is our default mode and it's always a lie that convinces us to act or believe otherwise. Always.”
― Ross Gay, The Book of Delights: Essays

“...in witnessing someone's being touched, we are also witnessing someone's being moved, the absence of which in ourselves is a sorrow, and a sacrifice. And witnessing the absence of movement in ourselves by witnessing its abundance in another...can hurt. Until it becomes, if we are lucky, an opening.”
― Ross Gay, The Book of Delights: Essays

“2 I know it might be tedious, and I know I might be close to undelightful ranting, but I’m going to take one more step toward us to suggest that any time we opt for the human interaction rather than the automated or digital one, which requires noticing how ubiquitous the automated or digital one has become (ubiquity makes invisibility, makes us look up from our machines and be like where’d the people go?)—checking out groceries; getting our ibuprofen; the menu thing; being in class; getting directions; finding or buying a book; learning how to do stuff—is a small act of revolt. Except there’s no such thing as small revolt, because each revolt, even if only fleetingly, even if only for an instant, is making the world of our dreams.”
― Ross Gay, The Book of (More) Delights: Essays

“My hunch is that joy is an ember for or precursor to wild and unpredictable and transgressive and unboundaried solidarity.”
― Ross Gay, Inciting Joy: Essays

“For instance, the previous run-on sentence is a sentence fragment, and it happened in part because of the really nice time my body was having making this lavender Le Pen make the loop-de-looping we call language. I mean writing. The point: I’d no sooner allow that fragment to sit there like a ripe zit if I was typing on a computer. And consequently, some important aspect of my thinking, particularly the breathlessness, the accruing syntax, the not quite articulate pleasure that evades or could give a fuck about the computer’s green corrective lines (how they injure us!) would be chiseled, likely with a semicolon and a proper predicate, into something correct, and, maybe, dull. To be sure, it would have less of the actual magic writing is, which comes from our bodies, which we actually think with, quiet as it’s kept.”
― Ross Gay, The Book of Delights: Essays

“But if you think of art as something you wonder about, or listen to, or get lost in the making of, as something that might be trying to show you something you do not yet know how to understand, something that, again, unfixes us, perhaps we can practice making and heeding that.”
― Ross Gay, Inciting Joy: Essays

“And we replant that insurgent gratitude by saving the seeds we have been given. And giving them away.”
― Ross Gay, Inciting Joy: Essays

“I swore when I got into this poem I would convert
this sorrow into some kind of honey with the little musics
I can sometimes make with these scribbled artifacts
of our desolation.”
― Ross Gay, Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude

“The way the universe sat waiting to become,
quietly, in the nether of space and time,

you too remain some cellular snuggle
dangling between my legs, curled in the warm

swim of my mostly quietest self. If you come to be —
And who knows? — I wonder, little bubble

of unbudded capillaries, little one ever aswirl
in my vascular galaxies, what would you think

of this world which turns itself steadily
into an oblivion that hurts, and hurts bad?”
― Ross Gay