Quotes About Reflection

What if, instead of carrying a child, I am supposed to carry grief?

dearest, can you tell, I am trying to love you less.

and I never knew survival was like that. If you live, you look back and beg for it again, the hazardous bliss before you know what you would miss.

I am not obsessing. I am just sitting here perforating this post-it with a push-pin.

Even now, I don't know much about happiness. I still worry and want an endless stream of more, but some days I can see the point in growing something, even if it's just to say I cared enough.

I imagine the insides of myself sometimes-- part female, part male, part terrible dragon.

someone I could hold up to my ear and hear the ocean, something I could say my name into, and have it returned in the inky waves.

Sometimes, you have to look around at the life you've made and sort of nod at it, like someone moving their head up and down to a tune they like.

No one wants to be remembered for their death, or rather, I don't. So why do I remember hers and remember hers? I

Maybe my limbs are made mostly for decoration, like the way I feel about persimmons.

I thought power was something you could control. Something one could do at a desk or on a job site, to work in the field of power. Now the tree is gone. The men are gone, just a ground-down stump where what felt like wisdom once was.

I loved them: my own bright dead things. I'm thirty-five and remember all that I've done wrong. Yesterday I was nice, but in truth I resented the contentment of the field. Why must we practice this surrender? What I mean is: there are days I still want to kill the carrots because I can.

I slip into bed and lie there beside Your body like a buoy that the ocean resents. If I could just grab hold and find a way to paddle, If you could stop dragging your feet along the gravel. As a child I remember knowing how to float When sober was the wind and my body, the boat. Now each step is anchored and you continue to drift In the room where we pretend that we are alive, Where you and I commit the sin, and you and I forgive.

Mostly, I enjoy my failings. Until I don't.

Poetry is a place where both grief and grace can live, where rage can be explored and examined, not simply exploited.

Annie Dillard once wrote, "How we spend our days is of course how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour and that one is what we are doing." I think about this a lot when I'm planning my day and what sort of pleasure I might suck out of its marrow during these tumultuous times of constant upheaval and war. Sometimes that means noticing even the most mundane of tasks in order to know we are alive, that we are living.

What is it about noticing beauty that brings you out of yourself and returns you to yourself?

It turns out poetry does, in fact, do the thing I want it to do… it helps me return to the world, to experience it, to pay attention.

I'll never see you again, but that's a note I tear up in my mind.

You can't sum it up, my mother says as we are driving and the electronic voice repeats, Turn Left onto Wildwood Canyon Road, so I turn left, happy for the mundane instructions. Let us robot at once. Tell me where to go. Tell me how to get there. She means a life, of course. You cannot sum it up.

It wasn't until later, when I moved in with him and stood outside on our patchy imperfect lawn, that I remembered what had been circling in me: I am beautiful. I am full of love. I am dying.

Sometimes I think the memory of an event is better than the event itself.

I'm thirty-five and remember all that I've done wrong.

One question that I often get asked is how to overcome writer's block. And the funny thing is, I overcome it, by not overcoming it. I think it's okay to not write. I think it's okay not to talk, not to make, not to create, not to produce, produce, produce. How can we listen to the world if we are always talking to the world?