Quotes from Elizabeth Alexander

Have you located your passion as if this was your last night on earth?

every shut eye ain't asleep, every goodbye ain't gone.

I was a ten in sadness when I was crying, Mommy, but now I am a six. Whoops, he says, it just went down to five. He comes out of the shower and puts on his pajamas. Now it's just a three. He brushes his teeth. Now it's all gone, he says. We were with Daddy when he died.

My mother-in-law's last night on earth, a fox crossed our path in Branford, Connecticut, as we left the hospice. We knew somehow that it was her, as I now know the ravenous hawk came to take Ficre. Do I believe that? Yes, I do. Poetic logic is my logic. I do not believe she was a fox. But I believe the fox was a harbinger. I believe that it was a strange enough occurrence that it should be heeded. Zememesh Berhe, the quick, red fox, soon passed from this life to the next.

Perhaps tragedies are only tragedies in the presence of love, which confers meaning to loss.

Henry Ford believed the soul of a person is located in their last breath and so captured the last breath of his best friend Thomas Edison in a test tube and kept it evermore. It is on display at the Henry Ford Museum outside Detroit, like Galileo's finger in the church of Santa Croce, but Edison's last breath is an invisible relic.

In all marriages there is struggle and ours was no different in that regard. But we always came to the other shore, dusted off and said, 'There you are, my love.

A new self reveals itself when the old carapace has shed and died, as though we live in exoskeletons with something truer underneath.

Soon the two children will walk down Edgehill Road from the bus stop like burros under their knapsacks

In simplicity is such guiding truth. I turn again to the spirituals. "This little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine" could also be an epigraph to this book, if it were not understood as being simply a merry exhortation. It was, after all, best known as an anthem during the mighty struggles of the civil rights movement. That beautifully repeated let it shine, let it shine, let it shine performs the will to live in the context of mighty, life-and-death struggle.

Half of the things are as they seem. The other half, who knows. This has always been true.

It is the beginning and the end of the astrological calendar, and so it is said that children born on March 21 are ancient sounds who possess the wonder and innocence of newborns.

Everything was told! Then we could begin something new.

The story seems to begin with catastrophe but in fact began earlier and is not a tragedy but rather a love story. Perhaps tragedies are only tragedies in the presence of love, which confers meaning to loss. Loss is not felt in the absence of love.

Poetry is what you find in the dirt in the corner, overhear on the bus, God in the details, the only way to get from here to there.

now I know my capacity for awe is infinite: this thirst is permanent, the well bottomless, my good fortune vast.

What if the mightiest word is love, love beyond marital, filial, national. Love that casts a widening pool of light. Love with no need to preempt grievance. In today's sharp sparkle, this winter air, anything can be made, any sentence begun. On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp -- praise song for walking forward in that light.

Art replaces the light that is lost when the day fades, the moment passes, the evanescent extraordinary makes its quicksilver. Art tries to capture that which we know leaves us, as we move in and out of each other's lives, as we all must eventually leave this earth. Great artists know that shadow, work always against the dying light, but always knowing that the day brings new light and that the ocean which washes away all traces on the sand leaves us a new canvas with each wave.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final. Don't let yourself lose me. Nearby is the country they call life. You will know it by its seriousness. Give me your hand.

friendship in marriage is its own thing: friendship in a cup of tea, or a glass of wine, or a cappuccino every Sunday morning. Friendship in buying undershirts and underpants. Friendship in picking up a prescription or rescuing the towed car. Friendship in waiting for the phone call after the mammogram. Friendship in toast buttered just so. Friendship in shoveling the snow. I am the one you want to tell. You are the one I want to tell.

I have not yet learned to use our television DVR. One of the points of marriage is that you split labor. In the olden days that meant one hunted and one gathered; now it means one knows where the tea-towels are kept and the other knows how to program the DVR, for why should we both have to know?

In the absence of organized religion, faith abounds, in the form of song and art and food and strong arms.

It's a fact: black people in this country die more easily, at all ages, across genders. Look at how young black men die, and how middle-aged black men drop dead, and how black women are ravaged by HIV/AIDS. The numbers graft to poverty but they also graph to stresses known and invisible. How did we come here, after all? Not with upturned chins and bright eyes but rather in chains, across a chasm. But what did we do? We built a nation, and we built its art.

Using the voice is a physical act, one that first announces the existence of the body of residence and then trumpets its arrival in a public space.