"People who read poetry have heard about the burning bush, but when you write poetry, you sit inside the burning bush."
"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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Source: The Totality of Causes. Interview with Tina Chang, www.poets.org. February 21, 2014.
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More quotes by Li-Young Lee
"Brimming. That's what it is, I want to get to a place where my sentences enact brimming."
"Memory is sweet. Even when it’s painful, memory is sweet."
"Every time you write a poem it’s apocalyptic. You’re revealing who you really are to yourself."
"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."
"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."