"People who read poetry have heard about the burning bush, but when you write poetry, you sit inside the burning bush."
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Quote collection
Li-Young Lee quotes (page 1 of 2)
26 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Brimming. That's what it is, I want to get to a place where my sentences enact brimming."
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"Memory is sweet. Even when it’s painful, memory is sweet."
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"To pull the metal splinter from my palm my father recited a story in a low voice. I watched his lovely face and not the blade. Before the story ended, he'd removed the iron sliver I thought I'd die from. I can't remember the tale, but hear his voice still, a well of dark water, a prayer. And I recall his hands, two measures of tenderness he laid against my face."
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"That's what I want, that kind of recklessness where the poem is even ahead of you. It's like riding a horse that's a little too wild for you, so there's this tension between what you can do and what the horse decides it's going to do."
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"Every time you write a poem it’s apocalyptic. You’re revealing who you really are to yourself."
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"There are days we live as if death were nowhere in the background; from joy to joy to joy, from wing to wing, from blossom to blossom to impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom."
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"I've been thinking about something for a long time, and I keep noticing that most human speech-if not all human speech-is made with the outgoing breath. This is the strange thing about presence and absence. When we breath in, our bodies are filled with nutrients and nourishment. Our blood is filled with oxygen, our skin gets flush; our bones get harder-they get compacted. Our muscles get toned and we feel very present when we're breathing in. The problem is, that when we're breathing in, we can't speak. So presence and silence have something to do with each other."
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"While all bodies share the same fate, all voices do not."
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"Maybe being winged means being wounded by infinity."
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"Poetry is the language of extremity. Poetry is a transfer of potency. You feel something potent and then you transfer it onto the page."
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"A bruise, blue in the muscle, you impinge upon me. As bone hugs the ache home, so I'm vexed to love you, your body the shape of returns, your hair a torso of light, your heat I must have, your opening I'd eat, each moment of that soft-finned fruit, inverted fountain in which I don't see me."
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"Our bodies look solid, but they arent. Were like a fountain. A fountain of water looks solid, but you can put your fingers right through it. Our bodies look like things, but theres no thingness to them."
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"The knowledge that it takes to write a poem gets burnt up in the writing of the poem."
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"In writing poetry, all of one's attention is focused on some inner voice."
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"Some things never leave a person: scent of the hair of one you love, the texture of persimmons, in your palm, the ripe weight."
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"I don't mind suffering as long as it's really about something. I don't mind great luck, if it's about something. If it's the hollow stuff, then there's no gift, one way or the other."
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"We suffer each other to have each other a while."
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"The problem with memory is that is changes whatever it touches. It is never that accurate. As a result, I end up modifying and revising my own experiences. It's myth making."
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"I am that last, that final thing, the body in a white sheet listening."
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