Nate Pritts > Quotes

“The life we live isn’t growing but fleeing
from us leaves us empty / pining”
― Nate Pritts

“The sky of my day is blue
in a way that hurts

all the unblueness inside me
& there are thousands of lines

that I could write next
but I’m waiting to figure out

which one is the best.
I woke up in a puddle of sun

& my soul was maybe raptured;
if it was a garment

it was undone like a girl
& those parts of my heart.

It’s impossible to predict
when something you don’t want

to forget
will happen. I’d rather not miss it

right away. I’d rather be struck
by how necessary this is.

—Nate Pritts, “Notes on the Morning,” Sweet Nothing (Lowbrow Press LLC, 2011)”
― Nate Pritts, Sweet Nothing

“I work so hard to forget myself
& now the trees are full of autumn.
This is the time of year when I would rip myself apart
if I thought it would do any good.”
― Nate Pritts

“There was a tree yesterday that might have held thousands of leaves or snowflakes or tears or birds, or thousands of years of trying to be better.”
― Nate Pritts, Right Now More Than Ever

“Remember last winter & paper snowflakes in the windows. Remember snowflakes not melting in the sunshine. The Mondayness of this light. I still get distracted by clouds; almost two weeks now & my morning eyes are stifled by cloud in this present Octoberousness. There are things that only happen once happening all the time! Someone held a bird & said to me “For you.” Someone made a bird out of paper so it wouldn’t disappear in the heat. I’m writing every poem to you.”
― Nate Pritts, Right Now More Than Ever

“I teach myself to control the forward fall. Sometimes there’s a breath in the trees that crowd the lakeshore”
― Nate Pritts, Right Now More Than Ever

“Sometimes the sun sets

& things that shouldn’t be
golden are golden. There’s a field.
There’s a lake & a tree & a bird.

Sometimes I am goldenrod crowding a field.
Leaves fall from my branches
but I try to hold on.”
― Nate Pritts, Right Now More Than Ever

“People are acting crazy in February because their lives are nothing but marks & lines.”
― Nate Pritts, Right Now More Than Ever

“Tuesday clouds this hectic splatter, distorts the calendar’s faith in progression, its suspicion of narrative.”
― Nate Pritts, Right Now More Than Ever

“I say your name out loud in the blue, in a field of fields, in my own voice. I keep going.”
― Nate Pritts, Right Now More Than Ever

“in love with the ground, the feet of the real buried in sand on a beach you can’t reach except in memory.”
― Nate Pritts, Right Now More Than Ever

“Early morning & I don’t care that it’s starless. It’s okay that it’s endless but full of endings.”
― Nate Pritts, Right Now More Than Ever

“Say one thing over & over into the atmosphere & you’ll convince the stars to believe it.”
― Nate Pritts, Right Now More Than Ever

“Me a proud honorary astronaut sent out as a lover of uncontained & immortal beauty”
― Nate Pritts, Right Now More Than Ever

“Frost in autumn, frost at midnight, Frost on a hotel bed, telescoping from mountains to buzzsaws, each of your eyes a diamond ripping through my wooden soul, a stunning revelation no matter which of five mountain ranges you’re planted on”
― Nate Pritts, Right Now More Than Ever

“& I am wildly annunciatory; I am some pine tree utterance; I am a broken sonnet shattered in the fall & fitted back together.”
― Nate Pritts, Right Now More Than Ever

“& I’m waking up lonely with arms that can’t do what they know to do, palms shaped like empty rosebuds.”
― Nate Pritts, Right Now More Than Ever

“You cannot fight against the truth
of what has happened.
You cannot expect metaphor
to comfort you”
― Nate Pritts