Quotes from Elizabeth Alexander

Loss is not felt in the absence of love.

They shared an unshakeable belief in beauty, in overflow, in everythingness, the bursting, indelible beauty in a world where there is so much suffering and wounding and pain.

To live in memory and in dreams is a cruel comfort.

Each of us made it possible for the other. We got something done. Each believed in the other unsurpassingly.

It happened; it is part of who we are; it is our beauty and our terror. We must be gleaners from what life has set before us.

For loss is our common denominator. None of us will escape it. None of us will outrun death. What do we do in the space between that is our lives? What is the quality and richness of our lives? How do we move through struggle and let community hold us when we have been laid low? This

Each of us made it possible for the other. We got something done. Each believed in the other unsurpassingly. 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.

Now I know for sure the soul is an evanescent thing and the body is its temporary container, because I saw it. I saw the body with the soul in it, I saw the body with the soul leaving, and I saw the body with the soul gone.

I been in sorrow's kitchen and done licked out all the pots. Nobody knows the trouble I seen. Steal away to Jesus. I ain't got long to stay here.

There will always be children and there will always be old people. We spend most of our lives somewhere in between. When we produce the children, we get to be royalty for a short while--the world pulls out its chair for the pregnant woman--but soon we are once again worker bees, tending the little ones.

The basket of remembrance has three sides; one is open, can it tilt and spill out?

I wake up grateful, for life is a gift.

And so i write to fix him in place, to pass time in his company, to make sure I remember, even though I know I will never forget.

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.

The days are long but the years are short," some say, about the early years of child rearing

Flowers live, they are perfect and they affect us; they are God's glory, they make us know why we are alive and human, that we behold. They are beautiful, and then they die and rot and go back to the earth that gave birth to them.

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.