Quotes from Terrance Hayes

I wish I could weep the way my teacher did as he read us Molly Bloom's soliloquy of yes.

It might be the white woman or man our son or daughter will marry and the white woman or man our grandson or granddaughter will marry, all of them wading into the future until one of our line claims to be Sicilian. Leave instructions: the granddaughter of our granddaughter shall be named Cicily.

If you and every person in the county mailed me an envelope of five to ten dollars, I think I could rehabilitate the sheep.

Can you remember the womb? How, in the moments before birth, The lines were washed from the map That told the route you'd come?

My mother was a dark red head wrap. Her life had been heavier than the fire she carried on her back.     This is the meaning of the past, Boy. There were maps & scriptures carved into my palms, whole towns

I believe everything is a metaphor for sex.

If you think a hammer is the only way to hammer / A nail, you ain't thought of the nail correctly.

It's not the bad people who are brave I fear, it's the good people who are afraid.

Give the world half of what Nina Simone gave it, and you have lived an exceptional life.

Assassin, you are a mystery / To me, I say to my reflection sometimes

It is not enough to love you. It is not enough to want you destroyed.

No one Mentions Jesus' sister. Nothing is written About her. She had no children, she was in her Forties the first time she turned water into wine.

Thus, I am here where poets come to drink a dark strong poison with tiny shards of ice, something to loosen my primate tongue and its syllables of debris. I know all words come from preexisting words and divide until our pronouncements develop selves.

May all the gold you touch burn, rot, and rust.

Sometimes the father almost sees looking at the son, how handsome he'd be if half his own face was made of the woman he loved

Why youth seems to be my only requisite for beauty now is beyond me.

I aint mad at you assassin. It's not the brave bad people I fear, it's the good people who are affraid.

Our sermon today concerns the dialectic Blessings in transgression & transcendence.

If we have less time alive than the time we have lived, shouldn't it all be comfort food?

It's not the bad people who are brave I fear, it's the good people who are afraid.

My hunch is that Sylvia Plath was not Especially fun company. A drama queen, thin-skinned, And skittery, she thought her poems were ordinary.

Possibly twilight makes blackness dangerous Darkness. Probably all my encounters Are existential jambalaya. Which is to say, A nigga can survive. Something happened In Sanford, something happened in Ferguson And Brooklyn & Charleston, something happened In Chicago & Cleveland & Baltimore & happens Almost everywhere in this country every day. Probably someone is prey in all of our encounters. You won't admit it. The names alive are like the names In graves.

Are you not the color of this country's current threat Advisory?

Probably, ghosts are allergic to us. Our uproarious Breathing & ruckus. Our eruptions, our disregard For dust.