Lex > Lex's Quotes

“I look at you and see all the ways a soul can bruise, and I wish I could sink my hands into your flesh and light lanterns along your spine so you know that there's nothing but light when I see you.”
― Shinji Moon, The Anatomy of Being

“Once, I believed in you like a poem, turned your heart into a metaphor for my heart, turned our mouths into honey and caramel lozenges.
But metaphors come and metaphors go,
and not even seasons have the courtesy to stay till dawn.”
― Shinji Moon, The Anatomy of Being

“I am not as strong as my words pretend to be. Not
as quiet as these caesuras promise. This heart is a patchwork quilt of people
that leave different shades of blue inside of me.”
― Shinji Moon, The Anatomy of Being

“You,
with your hands full of Earth and your head full of
rainfall. How many hearts do you hold in your own?”
― Shinji Moon, The Anatomy of Being

“And still,
Your mouth on my mouth
Is a thought as fresh as
Melting icicles away
With my breath”
― Shinji Moon, The Anatomy of Being

“I will never fail to inflate my lungs for you when you're a hundred miles deep, heading headfirst towards a telephone pole - screaming - because you have pulled out all your own brakes.”
― Shinji Moon, The Anatomy of Being

“I touch the knots beneath the skin of your back,
trace the tree lines around your wrist,
and you smile at me and I love you
for how human you are.”
― Shinji Moon, The Anatomy of Being

“Listen.

When the wind blows
all your candles out, when the stars
turn to plumes of smoke,
when your mother makes you watch
as the matches burn out in her eyes,

Let me hold your hand, your skin,
the stones you've swallowed in your sleep.

Let me
slip your soul out of your skin
so you can sleep in my palms
for tonight.”
― Shinji Moon, The Anatomy of Being

“Underneath the moonlight,
we laid and laughed
like run-on sentences, kissed like ellipses, and
you held me so close that I wear my bones down smooth
against
the grain of your skin.”
― Shinji Moon, The Anatomy of Being

“English language, my ass.
When you kiss me, my syntax hits
the wall across the room and shatters
in shards of words that scatter
across the floor.”
― Shinji Moon, The Anatomy of Being

“I love you for how human you are.”
― Shinji Moon, The Anatomy of Being

“I want to take long romantic walks up your arm with my lips.
I wanna picnic on the arc of your neck and sneak a bottle of wine
in a thermos with you and get stoned
somewhere on the mossy side of your ribs.”
― Shinji Moon, The Anatomy of Being

“O, how the body knows all
that language cannot say.”
― Shinji Moon, The Anatomy of Being

“People change and people keep change and we keep paying ticket fines and hoping that that means something close to love, and I'm bankrupt from missing you.”
― Shinji Moon, The Anatomy of Being

“I'm running out of things to say.
I've stopped stealing pages out of poetry books, but last week I pocketed a thesaurus and looked for synonyms for you and could only find rain
and more rain
and a thunderstorm that sounded like glass, like crystal, an orchestra.”
― Shinji Moon, The Anatomy of Being

“There are poetries inside of you the paper cannot handle”
― Shinji Moon , The Anatomy of Being

“You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.”
― Mary Oliver

“Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.”
― Mary Oliver

“Instructions for living a life.
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.”
― Mary Oliver

“You must not ever stop being whimsical. And you must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your life.”
― Mary Oliver, Wild Geese

“I believe in kindness. Also in mischief. Also in singing, especially when singing is not necessarily prescribed.”
― Mary Oliver

“I want to think again of dangerous and noble things.
I want to be light and frolicsome.
I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing,
as though I had wings.”
― Mary Oliver, Owls and Other Fantasies: Poems and Essays

“Sometimes I need
only to stand
wherever I am
to be blessed.”
― Mary Oliver, Evidence: Poems

“I tell you this
to break your heart,
by which I mean only
that it break open and never close again
to the rest of the world.”
― Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems, Vol. 2

“The Uses Of Sorrow

(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)

Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.”
― Mary Oliver, Thirst

“To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.”
― Mary Oliver

“I Go Down To The Shore

I go down to the shore in the morning
and depending on the hour the waves
are rolling in or moving out,
and I say, oh, I am miserable,
what shall—
what should I do? And the sea says
in its lovely voice:
Excuse me, I have work to do.”
― Mary Oliver, A Thousand Mornings: Poems

“Ten times a day something happens to me like this - some strengthening throb of amazement - some good sweet empathic ping and swell. This is the first, the wildest and the wisest thing I know: that the soul exists and is built entirely out of attentiveness.”
― Mary Oliver

“it is a serious thing // just to be alive / on this fresh morning / in this broken world.”
― Mary Oliver, Red Bird

“there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do --
determined to save
the only life you could save.”
― Mary Oliver