Quotes from Natasha Trethewey

There are indeed all sorts of men/ who visit here: those who want/ nothing but to talk or hear the soft tones/ of a woman's voice; others prefer/ simply to gaze upon me, my face/ turned from them as they touch/ only themselves. And then there are those,/ of course, whose desires I cannot commit/ to paper.

I read the line over and over as if I might discern the little fires set the flames of an idea licking the page how knowledge burns

What matters is the transformative power of metaphor and the stories we tell ourselves about the arc and meaning of our lives.

To survive trauma one must be able to tell a story about it.

Of course, we're made up of what we've forgotten too, what we've tried to bury or suppress. Some forgetting is necessary and the mind works to shield us from things that are too painful; even so, some aspect of trauma lives on in the body, from which it can reemerge unexpectedly

what knowledge haunts each body, what history, what phantom ache?

I don't like a kind of workshop that is about editing--I don't want to sit there and be an editor. I don't want to tell someone how to fix a poem.

A man's pursuit of knowledge is greater than his shortcomings, the limits of his vision.

What's left is palimpsest—one memory bleeding into another, overwriting it.

Goodbye is the waving map of your palm, is a stone on my tongue.

In every family, at some point, there must be someone who feels like an outsider: the one always standing or sitting a little farther from the group in pictures; the older sibling when a new baby comes along; the child from a previous marriage, sometimes with a different last name. Suddenly, I was all of those.

Memory knows before knowing remembers," William Faulkner wrote.

In the narrative of my life, which is the look backward rather than forward into the unknown and unstoried future, I emerged from the pool as from a baptismal font—changed, reborn—as if I had been shown what would be my calling even then. This is how the past fits into the narrative of our lives, gives meaning and purpose. Even my mother's death is redeemed in the story of my calling, made meaningful rather than merely senseless. It is the story I tell myself to survive.

I think poets are people who are like this; for whatever reason you feel psychological exile because you're always an outsider...

Why not make a fiction of the mind's fictions?

I returned to a field of cotton, hallowed ground — as slave legend goes — each boll holding the ghosts of generations: those who measured their days by the heft of sacks and lengths of rows, whose sweat flecked the cotton plants still sewn into our clothes.

I have always loved the feel of books, the way they give a literal weight to words and make of them a sacred object.

Do you know what it means to have a wound that never heals?

This is how the past interrupts our lives, all of it entering the same doorway--like the hole in the trunk of my neighbor's tree: at once a natural shelter, haven for small creatures, but also evidence of injury, an entrance for decay.

Frost wrote, "is that unless you are at home in the metaphor, unless you have had your proper poetical education in the metaphor, you are not safe anywhere. Because you are not at ease with figurative values: you don't know the metaphor in its strength and its weakness. . .

That morning, awkward and heavy...

The yoke of my birth

the dark foil in this American story

Mommy, you say quietly, so as not to be overheard. Do you know how, when you love someone and you know they are hurting, it hurts you, too?