Timna Mayer > Timna's Quotes

“You wanted happiness, I can’t blame you for that, and maybe a mouth sounds idiotic when it blathers on about joy but tell me you love this, tell me you’re not miserable.”
― Richard Siken, Crush

“I swear, I end up feeling empty, like you've taken something out of me and I have to search my body for scars.”
― Richard Siken, Crush

“A man takes his sadness down to the river and throws it in the river
                    but then he’s still left
with the river. A man takes his sadness and throws it away
                                                                        but then he’s still left with his hands.”
― Richard Siken, Crush

“Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us.
These, our bodies, possessed by light.
Tell me we'll never get used to it.”
― Richard Siken, Crush

“You’re falling now. You’re swimming. This is not
          harmless. You are not
                    breathing.”
― Richard Siken, Crush

“When it's this windy doesn't it seem impossible
to grow old?”
― Olena Kalytiak Davis, And Her Soul Out Of Nothing

“did I mention my first kiss was extracted by someone who never should have been that lucky?”
― Olena Kalytiak Davis, Shattered Sonnets, Love Cards, and Other Off and Back Handed Importunities

“Every time you wish the sky was something happening to your heart, you lose twice.”
― Olena Kalytiak Davis, And Her Soul Out Of Nothing

“The sky has stopped
offering you reasons to live and your heart is the rock
you threw through each window
of what's deserted you, so you turn
to the burnt out building inside you: the scaffolding
overhead, the fallen beams,
the unsound framework;


according to the blue that's printed on the inside of your arms
you have no plans, no plans
uncovered, or uncovering: the offing is emptying,


the horizon empty


now that your sanity is
a tarp or a bedsheet
in the rough hands of the wind,


now that everything is hooded
in drop cloth.


It didn't happen
overnight. Or maybe it did:


your heart, the rock;
your soul, the Gothic barn.”
― Olena Kalytiak Davis, And Her Soul Out Of Nothing

“I thought: please don’t grow
familiar. I think I said it out loud:
Please don’t let me love you
that horrible way.”
― Olena Kalytiak Davis, And Her Soul Out Of Nothing

“Perhaps everyone has a story that could break your heart...”
― Nick Flynn

“Perhaps it is our fear, that in the silence between stories, in the moment of falling, the fear that we will never find the one story which will save us, and so we lunge for another, and we feel safe again, if only for as long as we are telling it.”
― Nick Flynn

“If it had been a heart attack, the newspaper
might have used the word massive,
as if a mountain range had opened
inside her, but instead

it used the word suddenly, a light coming on

in an empty room. The telephone

fell from my shoulder, a black parrot repeating
something happened, something awful

a sunday, dusky. If it had been

terminal, we could have cradled her
as she grew smaller, wiped her mouth,

said good-bye. But it was sudden,

how overnight we could be orphaned
& the world became a bell we'd crawl inside
& the ringing all we'd eat.”
― Nick Flynn

“I love how intimate I've become with failure.”
― Bob Hicok

“My life the only thing that has been with me my whole life”
― Bob Hicok

“You remember too much,
my mother said to me recently.
Why hold onto all that? And I said,
Where can I put it down?”
― Anne Carson, Glass, Irony and God

“When I desire you a part of me is gone...”
― Anne Carson

“Give me a world, you have taken the world I was.”
― Anne Carson

“Time isn't made of anything. It is an abstraction. Just a meaning that we impose upon motion.”
― Anne Carson

“A man moves through time. It means nothing except that, like a harpoon, once thrown he will arrive.”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

“we disappear.
It happens to me frequently. You disappear? Yes and then come back.
Moments of death I call them.”
― Anne Carson

“he stood against the wind and let it peel him
clean”
― Anne Carson

“When people ask me how to find happiness in life I tell them, First learn how to cook.”
― Charles Simic

“One can live without having survived”
― Carolyn Forché

“[Here's where you imagine the rest.]”
― D.A. Powell

“...when he walks, he sounds like a tree still full of dead leaves holding on.”
― Zachary Schomburg, The Man Suit

“By being too sensitive I have wasted my life.”
― Arthur Rimbaud

“In the morning I had a look so lost, a face so dead, that perhaps those whom I met did not see me.

- Bad Blood”
― Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell

“Come from forever, and you will go everywhere.”
― Arthur Rimbaud

“On the blue summer evenings, I will go along the paths,
And walk over the short grass, as I am pricked by the wheat:
Daydreaming I will feel the coolness on my feet.
I will let the wind bathe my bare head. I will not speak,
I will have no thoughts: But infinite love will mount in my soul;
And I will go far, far off, like a gypsy,
through the countryside - as happy as if I were with a woman.

"Sensation”
― Arthur Rimbaud