Quotes from John Koethe

It's where you are in your imagination That's important, for the life of simply staying where you are Is a shadow's life, that leaves you by yourself, alone and scared. Why can't we just move on? The light up ahead is soft And seems to beckon us, glowing with a promise of beginning Once again, as if there were still time.

I want to keep the emptiness away, to realize the Sense of what it's like to be alive instead of just existing.

I only know I'm living in the interval between The luxuries of consciousness and the straits of sorrow, A bare condition of mere being in which nothing changes And a life is just the sum of its details as it slowly slips away. — John Koethe, from "On Being Dead," Beyond Belief: Poems (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2022)