Quotes from Brenda Shaughnessy

I came to see that what constitutes strength is not just a muscle or will. It can also include the most desperate vulnerability, the saddest heartache, the lightest, sweetest laughter.

Strength means honoring your entire range of emotion, even your despair and heartbreak.

Death and life are, for most of us, too complex to comprehend, but Alex Lemon can pretty casually, accurately, and marvelously correlate them to heavy metal and birthday cake.

What if all possible pain was only the grief of truth?

from A Love Story, Eight Takes) 8 As it turns out, there is a wrong way to tell this story. I was wrong to tell you how multi-true everything is, when it would be truer to say nothing. I've invented so much and prevented more. But I'd like to talk with you about other things, in absolute quiet. In extreme context. To see you again, isn't love revision? It could have gone so many ways. This just one of the ways it went. Tell me another.

How anyone becomes herself/is a mystery.

Where can we go if not to each other, resenting every step?

Would I dance with you? Both forever and rather die. / It would be like dying, yes. Yes I would.

All gifts are riddles, all lives/are in the middle of mother-lives.

I've been melted into something too easy to spill. I make more and more of myself in order to make more and more of the baby. He takes it, this making. And somehow he's made more of me, too.

What if all possible pain was only the grief of truth?

I do see the poet as someone whose role it is to push back against anti-intellectualism, anti-activism, and passivity in general. The purpose of this pushing back is to show that there are always infinite sides to a story, amazing unimagined perspectives on any narrative, and no limit to how weird and wild and unexpected our language and its meanings can get.

If the two meanings of 'heart' are 'center' and 'part,' then the word 'art' also forms a perplexing doubleness: it is something human-made with materials; that is, it is made of us. Art is life. And yet it is distinct from 'life.' Art is life's counterpoint. We make it, and in that making, art is pointedly not life. It is just made of us .

Secret, smug believers! God never gives you more than you can bear, they like to say, as if the strong should be punished for their strength: We can bear it. So we got it. But what about my baby? How weak does a newborn have to be to escape God's burdens?

Isn't blood a woman's ink?

be strange to yourself in your love, your grief

It seems unlikely that so much literature could be made from twenty-six letters. Doesn't it seem it could all be boiled down to one sentence?

When a woman you love hits you on the head with a book you love, is that love?

Me exploding at my mother who explodes at me because the explosion of some dark star all the way back struck hard at mother's mother's mother.

And now we eat. The eponymous eating. Don't want butter, don't want salt. Dinner is thinner but it's not my fault.

Grilled peaches on shortbread with raspberries and black pepper ice cream. We're all out, said the communicative waiter. That was twelve years ago.

I cling to this because to hope for this earth to go on after we're gone is the only kind of love left– the last good human piece of us.

Strength means...acknowledging each of those feelings, your questions and ideas and faith and terror, and meeting what comes with the full force of your heart.