Natasha Trethewey > Quotes

“You can get there from here, though there's no going home.
Everywhere you go will be somewhere you've never been.

"Theories of Time and Space”
― Natasha Trethewey

“There are indeed all sorts of men/ who visit here: those who want/ nothing but to talk or hear the soft tones/ of a woman's voice; others prefer/ simply to gaze upon me, my face/ turned from them as they touch/ only themselves. And then there are those,/ of course, whose desires I cannot commit/ to paper.”
― Natasha Trethewey

“I read the line over and over as if I might discern the little fires set the flames of an idea licking the page how knowledge burns”
― Natasha Trethewey, Thrall

“To survive trauma one must be able to tell a story about it.”
― Natasha Trethewey, Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir

“What matters is the transformative power of metaphor and the stories we tell ourselves about the arc and meaning of our lives.”
― Natasha Trethewey, Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir

“Of course, we’re made up of what we’ve forgotten too, what we’ve tried to bury or suppress. Some forgetting is necessary and the mind works to shield us from things that are too painful; even so, some aspect of trauma lives on in the body, from which it can reemerge unexpectedly”
― Natasha Trethewey, Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir

“what knowledge haunts each body, what history, what phantom ache?”
― Natasha Trethewey, Thrall

“What's left is palimpsest—one memory bleeding into another, overwriting it.”
― Natasha Trethewey, Thrall

“I don't like a kind of workshop that is about editing--I don't want to sit there and be an editor. I don't want to tell someone how to "fix" a poem.”
― Natasha Trethewey

“In Poetry as Survival, Gregory Orr asks the survivor’s questions about violence: How could I have been that close and not been destroyed by it? Why was I spared?—questions that can initiate in a writer the quest for meaning and purpose. “But this quest born out of trauma doesn’t simply lead the survivor forward,” he writes. “First it leads him or her backward, back to the scene of the trauma where the struggle must take place with the demon or angel who incarnates the mystery of violence and the mystery of rebirth and transformation.” He is referring to Lorca’s idea of duende: a demon that drives an artist, causing trouble or pain and an acute awareness of death. Of the demon’s effect on an artist’s work, Lorca wrote: “In trying to heal the wound that never heals lies the strangeness.”
― Natasha Trethewey, Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir

“In every family, at some point, there must be someone who feels like an outsider: the one always standing or sitting a little farther from the group in pictures; the older sibling when a new baby comes along; the child from a previous marriage, sometimes with a different last name. Suddenly, I was all of those.”
― Natasha Trethewey, Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir

“A man's pursuit of knowledge is greater than his shortcomings, the limits of his vision.”
― Natasha Trethewey, Thrall

“Do you know what it means to have a wound that never heals?”
― Natasha Trethewey, Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir

“Goodbye is the waving map of your palm, is a stone on my tongue.”
― Natasha Trethewey

“Memory knows before knowing remembers,” William Faulkner wrote.”
― Natasha Trethewey, Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir

“After Your Death

First, I emptied the closets of your clothes,
threw out the bowl of fruit, bruised
from your touch, left empty the jars

you bought for preserves. The next morning,
birds rustled the fruit trees, and later
when I twisted a ripe fig loose from its stem,

I found it half eaten, the other side
already rotting, or—like another I plucked
and split open—being taken from the inside:

a swarm of insects hollowing it. I’m too late,
again, another space emptied by loss.
Tomorrow, the bowl I have yet to fill.”
― Natasha Trethewey, Monument: Poems New and Selected

“I think poets are people who are like this; for whatever reason you feel psychological exile because you’re always an outsider...”
― Natasha Trethewey

“In the narrative of my life, which is the look backward rather than forward into the unknown and unstoried future, I emerged from the pool as from a baptismal font—changed, reborn—as if I had been shown what would be my calling even then. This is how the past fits into the narrative of our lives, gives meaning and purpose. Even my mother’s death is redeemed in the story of my calling, made meaningful rather than merely senseless. It is the story I tell myself to survive.”
― Natasha Trethewey, Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir

“I have always loved the feel of books, the way they give a literal weight to words and make of them a sacred object.”
― Natasha Trethewey, Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir

“I returned
to a field of cotton, hallowed ground —

as slave legend goes — each boll
holding the ghosts of generations:

those who measured their days
by the heft of sacks and lengths

of rows, whose sweat flecked the cotton plants
still sewn into our clothes.”
― Natasha Trethewey, Native Guard: Poems

“Why not make a fiction of the mind's fictions?”
― Natasha Trethewey, Thrall

“Illumination

Always there is something more to know

what lingers at the edge of thought

awaiting illumination as in

this second-hand book full

of annotations daring the margins in pencil

a light stroke as if

the writer of these small replies

meant not to leave them forever

meant to erase

evidence of this private interaction

Here a passage underlined there

a single star on the page

as in a night sky cloud-swept and hazy

where only the brightest appears

a tiny spark I follow

its coded message try to read in it

the direction of the solitary mind

that thought to pencil in

a jagged arrow It

is a bolt of lightning

where it strikes

I read the line over and over

as if I might discern

the little fires set

the flames of an idea licking the page

how knowledge burns Beyond

the exclamation point

its thin agreement angle of surprise

there are questions the word why

So much is left
untold Between

the printed words and the self-conscious scrawl

between what is said and not

white space framing the story

the way the past unwritten

eludes us So much

is implication the afterimage

of measured syntax always there

ghosting the margins that words

their black-lined authority

do not cross Even

as they rise up to meet us

the white page hovers beneath

silent incendiary waiting”
― Natasha Trethewey, Thrall

“Frost wrote, “is that unless you are at home in the metaphor, unless you have had your proper poetical education in the metaphor, you are not safe anywhere. Because you are not at ease with figurative values: you don’t know the metaphor in its strength and its weakness. . .”
― Natasha Trethewey, Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir

“the wages of empire is myopia”
― Natasha Trethewey, Thrall

“The yoke of my birth”
― Natasha Trethewey, Thrall

“The way you got sideswiped was by going back. —JOAN DIDION”
― Natasha Trethewey, Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir

“Mommy," you say quietly, so as not to be overheard. "Do you know how, when you love someone and you know they are hurting, it hurts you, too?”
― Natasha Trethewey, Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir

“That morning, awkward and heavy...”
― Natasha Trethewey, Thrall

“For my father, the myth of Cassandra had been just another way he sought to guide me toward what he thought I needed to know. In some versions, Cassandra's fate is that she is merely misunderstood--not unlike what my father imagined to be the obvious fate of a mixed-race child born in a place like Mississippi. "She was a prophet," he told me, "but no one would believe her." Over the years, though, this second naming would come to weigh heavily on me. It was as if, in giving me that name, he had given me not only the burden of foresight but also the notion of causation--that whatever it was, if I could imagine it, see it in my mind's eye, it would happen because I had envisioned it. As if I had willed it into being.”
― Natasha Trethewey, Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir

“Although I had intended to consider the impossibility of returning to those places we’ve come from—not because the places are gone or substantially different but because we are—by August of 2005, the poem had become quite literal: so much of what I’d known of my home was either gone or forever changed.

Trethewey, Natasha (2010-09-15). Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast (Sarah Mills Hodge Fund Publication) (Kindle Locations 79-81). University of Georgia Press. Kindle Edition.”
― Natasha Trethewey, Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast