Bright Dead Things Quotes

“I'm learning so many different ways to be quiet. There's how I stand in the lawn, that's one way. There's also how I stand in the field across from the street, that's another way because I'm farther from people and therefore more likely to be alone. There's how I don't answer the phone, and how I sometimes like to lie down on the floor in the kitchen and pretend I'm not home when people knock. There's daytime silent where I stare, and a nighttime silent when I do things. There's shower silent and bath silent and California silent and Kentucky silent and car silent and then there's the silence that comes back, a million times bigger than me, sneaks into my bones and wails and wails and wails until I can't be quiet anymore. That's how this machine works.”
― Ada Limon, Bright Dead Things

“I imagine what it must be like to stay hidden, disappear in the dusky nothing and stay still in the night. It’s not sadness, though it may sound like it. I’m thinking about people and trees and how I wish I could be silent more, be more tree than anything else, less clumsy and loud, less crow, more cool white pine, and how it’s hard not to always want something else, not just to let the savage grass grow.”
― Ada Limon, Bright Dead Things

“If we could light up the room with pain,
we’d be such a glorious fire.”
― Ada Limon, Bright Dead Things

“I remembered what had been circling in me: I am beautiful. I am full of love. I am dying.”
― Ada Limon, Bright Dead Things

“There are so many people who’ve come before us,
arrows and wagon wheels, obsidian tools, buffalo.
Look out at the meadow, you can almost see them,
generations dissolved in the bluegrass and hay.
I want to try and be terrific. Even for an hour.”
― Ada Limón, Bright Dead Things

“I want to give you something, or I want to take something from you. But I want to feel the exchange, the warm hand on the shoulder, the song coming out and the ear holding onto it.”
― Ada Limon, Bright Dead Things

“Here it is:
the new way of living with the world

inside of us so we cannot lose it,
and we cannot be lost.”
― Ada Limon, Bright Dead Things

“I like the lady horses best,
how they make it all look easy,
like running 40 miles per hour
is as fun as taking a nap, or grass.
I like their lady horse swagger,
after winning. Ears up, girls, ears up!
But mainly, let’s be honest, I like
that they’re ladies. As if this big
dangerous animal is also a part of me,
that somewhere inside the delicate
skin of my body, there pumps
an 8-pound female horse heart,
giant with power, heavy with blood.
Don’t you want to believe it?
Don’t you want to lift my shirt and see
the huge beating genius machine
that thinks, no, it knows,
it’s going to come in first.”
― Ada Limon, Bright Dead Things

“People have done this before, but not us.”
― Ada Limon, Bright Dead Things

“What I didn't like was how people talked to me
now that I was no longer single; they were nicer.

Men who never looked at me would start up a conversation,
like I was suddenly some safer form of fire.”
― Ada Limon, Bright Dead Things

“When the plane went down in San Francisco,
I thought of my friend M. He’s obsessed with plane crashes.

He memorizes the wrecked metal details,
the clear cool skies cut by black scars of smoke.

Once, while driving, he told me about all the crashes:
The one in blue Kentucky, in yellow Iowa.

How people go on, and how people don’t.

It was almost a year before I learned
that his brother was a pilot.

I can’t help it,
I love the way men love.”
― Ada Limon, Bright Dead Things

“I'm thirty-five and remember all that I've done wrong.”
― Ada Limon, Bright Dead Things

“I denied it,
this new land. But love, I’ll concede this:
whatever state you are, I’ll be that state’s bird,
the loud, obvious blur of song people point to
when they wonder where it is you’ve gone.”
― Ada Limon, Bright Dead Things

“I swear, I’ll try harder not to miss as much: the tree, or how your fingers under still sleep-stunned sheets coaxed all my colors back.”
― Ada Limon, Bright Dead Things: Poems

“Isn't it funny? How the cold numbs everything
but grief.
If we could light up the room with pain,
we'd be such a
glorious fire.”
― Ada Limon, Bright Dead Things

“Every time I’m in an airport,
I think I should drastically
change my life: Kill the kid stuff,
start to act my numbers, set fire
to the clutter and creep below
the radar like an escaped canine
sneaking along the fence line.
I’d be cable-knitted to the hilt,
beautiful beyond buying, believe
in the maker and fix my problems
with prayer and property.
Then, I think of you, home
with the dog, the field full
of purple pop-ups—we’re small
and flawed, but I want to be
who I am, going where
I’m going, all over again.”
― Ada Limon, Bright Dead Things

“Say we spend our last moments staring
at each other, hands knotted together,
clutching the dog, watching the sky burn.
Say, It doesn’t matter. Say, That would be
enough. Say you’d still want this: us alive,
right here, feeling lucky.”
― Ada Limon, Bright Dead Things

“There remains the mystery of how the pupil devours so much bastard beauty. Abandoned property.

This land and I are rewilding.”
― Ada Limon, Bright Dead Things

“...this life is a fist
of fast wishes caught by nothing
but the fishhook of tomorrow's tug.”
― Ada Limon, Bright Dead Things

“I imagine the insides of myself sometimes--
part female, part male, part terrible dragon.”
― Ada Limon, Bright Dead Things

“You’re the muscle
I cut from the bone and still the bone
remembers, still it wants (so much, it wants)
the flesh back, the real thing,
if only to rail against it, if only
to argue and fight, if only to miss
a solve-able absence.”
― Ada Limon, Bright Dead Things

“what I have done is risked everything for that hour, that hour in the black night, where one flashing light looks like love, I have pulled over my body’s car and let myself believe that the dance was only for me, that this gift of a breathing one-who-wants was always a gift, was the only sign worth stopping for, that the neon glow was a real star, gleaming in its dying, like us all, like us all.”
― Ada Limon, Bright Dead Things: Poems

“and I never knew survival was like that. If you live, you look back and beg for it again, the hazardous bliss before you know what you would miss.”
― Ada Limon, Bright Dead Things: Poems

“Bellow

"Tell the range and all that's howling,
the flickers of life beyond the weeds,
the vulture's furrowed brow of flight,
the blasted sticky Canadian lawn thistle;
tell the clowned-out clouds and the rain,
and all that makes you go quiet again,
tell them that you didn't come here
to make a fuss, or break, or growl, or
scream; tell them-crazy sky and stars
between-tell them you didn't come
to disturb the night air and throw a fit,
then get down in the dark and do it.”
― Ada Limon, Bright Dead Things

“I will play on this blessed earth until I die.”
― Ada Limon, Bright Dead Things

“Here it is: the new way of living with the world inside of us so we cannot lose it, and we cannot be lost. You and me are us and then, and it and sky.”
― Ada Limon, Bright Dead Things

“No one wants to be remembered for their death, or rather, I don’t. So why do I remember hers and remember hers? I”
― Ada Limon, Bright Dead Things: Poems

“Sometimes, you have to look around at the life you’ve made and sort of nod at it, like someone moving their head up and down to a tune they like.”
― Ada Limon, Bright Dead Things

“someone I could hold up to my ear and hear the ocean, something I could say my name into, and have it returned in the inky waves.”
― Ada Limon, Bright Dead Things: Poems

“How good it is to love live things, even when what they've done is terrible, how much we each want to be the pure exonerated creature, to be turned loose into our own wide open without a single harness of sin to stop us.”
― Ada Limon, Bright Dead Things