Quotes from Victoria Chang

As I write, more and more of my cells are replaced by language. When they burn a writer's body, the smoke will be shaped llike letters.

The way memory gets up after someone has died and starts walking.

The way grief takes many forms, as tears or pinwheels. The way the word haystack never conjures up the same image twice. The way we assume all tears taste the same. The way our sadness is plural, but grief is singular.

My mother, now covered, was no longer my mother. A covered apple is no longer an apple. A sketch of a person isn't the person. Somewhere, in the morning, my mother had become the sketch. And I would spend the rest of my life trying to shade her back in.

When I told my children, the three of us hugged in a circle, burst into tears. As if the tears were already there crying on their own and we, the newly bereaved, exploded into them.

Maybe I am staring into a piece of paper like it is a pond, hoping one day that what looks back is not my own reflection, but my great-grandmother's face. Maybe poetry is the distance between my face and her face. Maybe it's the difference between how the moon looks in the sky and how it contorts when a mayfly travels across the pond.

What's the rush?", you said about publishing. I added: "Does the world need another competent book of poems?" Most times, we wouldn't answer our own questions because what did we know? We only knew that we couldn't scrub poetry off our bodies. And we ourselves feared the greatest death, which was writing merely competent poems.

My mother did so much for me. What I returned to her were empty containers.

The way grief is really about future absence. The way the future closes its offices when a mother dies. What's left: a hole in the ground the size of violence.

If you saw my poems today, I hope you could see that I heard you even though you couldn't hear me. I have tried to write shorter + shorter + denser + denser + louder + louder poems. They have become so loud that each night I fold them into origamic cigarettes and smoke them so they'll blow away.

To borrow Julia Creet's phrase, maybe "memory is where we have arrived rather than where we have left." ... I used to think I was a transcriber of my own experiences and memories, adding an image here and there, but now I think I am more of a shaper. I take small fragments of image, memory, silence, and thought, and shape them with imagninary hands into something different.

The artist is only visiting pain, imagining it. We praise the artist, not the apple, not the apple's shadow, which is murdered slowly. There must be some way of drawing a picture so that it doesn't become an elegy.

Tomas Tranströmer—died on March 26, 2015, at the age of 83. He wrote: I am carried in my shadow / like a violin / in its black case. // The only thing I want to say / glitters out of reach / like the silver / in a pawnbroker's.

Before this other stone appeared, my mother's stone was still my mother because of the absence around her. The appearance of the new stone and the likeness to her stone implied my mother was a stone too, that my mother was buried under the stone too.

I put a fish ball in my mouth. My optimism covered the whole ball as if the fish had never died, had never been gutted and rolled into a humiliating shape. To acknowledge death is to acknowledge that we must take another shape.

In my child's homework: Which of the following happens eventually? a) You are born, b) You die, c) A long winter comes to an end, d) Practice makes perfect. I no longer know how to answer this.

At the end of the day, someone took the monitor and speakers away. But the music was still there. This was my first understanding of grief.

When a mother dies, a house becomes a forest. My children, children, know that I am in the trees. True love means you won't find me.

That darkness is not the absorption of color but the absorption of language.

Because dying lasts forever until it stops.

But maybe I am wrong, how death is simply death, each slightly different from the next but the final strike all the same. How the skin responds to a wedding dress in the same way it responds to rain.

A pioneering figure in the past, the future was the president of the present. You are sitting. But the future wants your chair. She is demanding.

The way grief is really about future absence.

This time gap can never be overcome. The difference is called grieving.