Quotes from Dean Young

Just because you've had enough doesn't mean you wanted too much.

Hark, dumbass, the error is not to fall but to fall from no height. Don't fall off a curb, fall off a cliff.

Go down any road far enough and you'll come to a slaughterhouse, but keep going and you'll reach the sea.

Here is a semi-transparent pebble I picked up on the way to my EKG. Probably worthless but it is my heart so take it.

Just because a thing can't be done doesn't mean it can't be did. We all look into mirrors and see phantoms. Our error is our Eros. Why is there something instead of nothing? The answer is reckless and surreal.

Poets are excellent students of blizzards and salt and broken statuary, but they are always elsewhere for the test. Any intention in the writing of poetry besides the aim to make a poem, of engaging the materials, SHOULD be disappointed. If the poet does not have the chutzpah to jeopardize habituated assumptions and practices, what will be produced will be sleep without dream, a copy of a copy of a copy.

Kissing a rose is a dumb thing to do not just from the rose's point of view. But it's a start like driving off a cliff's probably a finish. In beween you'll probably want to go to Mexico, get so drunk you think what you're doing is a dance.

Just because we have birds inside us, we don't have to be cages.

You bend the nail But keep hammering because Hammering makes the world

On mornings when I hope you forget my name, I walk through the high wet weeds that don't have names either. I do not remember the word dew. I do not remember what I told you with your ear in my teeth.

I don't believe in writer's block, writing well is very easy; it's writing horribly, the horrible work necessary to do to get to writing well, that is so difficult one may just not be willing to do it.

I still love the sound of breaking, the tearing of the page

When you are 70% sure, act / because the other 30% is reserved for hope / which is doubt turned upside-down.

Everyone says, Come to your senses, and I do, of you. Every touch electric, every taste you, every smell, even burning sugar, every cry and laugh. Toothpicked samples at the farmers' market, every melon, plum, I come undone, undone.

No one believing you is a symptom of telling the truth.

Just because we have birds inside is, we don't have to be cages. -from Instant Recognition between Strangers

Just because we have birds inside is, we don't have to be cages.

Even in sleep, dreamily I leap from the top stair to grab the arrow about to pierce my father's chest. I saved him I think for a moment then the feeling, no, that isn't so.