Shawna Lemay > Quotes

“How to recognize what is real? To know the layers and depths of oneself, to know how to open, to know how to fill a capacious hold-all, to know one’s own quirks and nervous twitches, cravings and transparencies, and, above all the force, literally the force, of events, connections, the wild calm in every thing. ”
― Shawna Lemay

“I pastiche, I quote, I lie. Fake, forge, forage, fabricate, copy, borrow, transform, steal. I illusion. I’m a genuine deceiver, a shy sham artist.”
― Shawna Lemay

“Yet I never sought what is real, yearned for the real, but rather I have yearned for dreams more than solid things. I can say I love the textures of dreams. The way they hover and almost taste. The clouds and darkness that linger behind, mostly unseen. And the palette of dreams. You can almost taste the colours, they seem as words on the tip of the tongue, unsayable as pomegranate seeds, unsayable as thick cream, the darkness of such a thick cream. This is why I am obsessed with dreams. They know what we cannot. Night after night they try and tell us the impossible. Dreams are secret and closed, and also contain everything, gushing, splayed open. Dream suitcases, carpetbags, hold-alls. They influence us secretly and they draw me to travel to nowhere, to beauty’s passage, through halls of mirrors where I know I am not myself, I know I am sublime. ”
― Shawna Lemay

“learned that you could come back to these places where your spirit was hurt or broken or leaking out, and you can replace those missing or damaged parts with something more joyful. That there are more ways to heal than one, and that in looking back at moments in a life, and holding them for a bit, you can laugh a little at how you were and who you are now. We get to reread our own selves, the stories of our lives, with tenderness and forgiveness.”
― Shawna Lemay, Apples on a Windowsill

“Hafiz: “Greatness / is always / built upon this foundation: / the ability to appear, speak, and act / as the most / common / man.”
― Shawna Lemay, Apples on a Windowsill

“tonglen—a Buddhist practice used to awaken compassion—on the in-breath you take in the pain of another, and on the out-breath you send them love and relief.”
― Shawna Lemay, Apples on a Windowsill