Li-Young Lee Quotes

19 quotes in 333 categories

• To pull the metal splinter from my palm my father recited a story in a low voice. I watched his lovely face and not the…
• People who read poetry have heard about the burning bush, but when you write poetry, you sit inside the burning bush.
• That's what I want, that kind of recklessness where the poem is even ahead of you. It's like riding a horse that's a little too…
• Every time you write a poem it’s apocalyptic. You’re revealing who you really are to yourself.
• Our bodies look solid, but they arent. Were like a fountain. A fountain of water looks solid, but you can put your fingers right through…
• And I never believed that the multitude / of dreams and many words were vain.
• I've been thinking about something for a long time, and I keep noticing that most human speech-if not all human speech-is made with the outgoing…
• In writing poetry, all of one's attention is focused on some inner voice.
• The problem with memory is that is changes whatever it touches. It is never that accurate. As a result, I end up modifying and revising…
• Could it be in longing we are most ourselves?
• I am that last, that final thing, the body in a white sheet listening,
• We suffer each other to have each other a while.
• A poem is like a score for the human voice.
• Maybe being winged means being wounded by infinity.
• A bruise, blue in the muscle, you impinge upon me. As bone hugs the ache home, so I'm vexed to love you, your body the…
• A door jumps out from shadows, then jumps away. This is what I've come to find: the back door, unlatched. Tooled by insular wind, it…
• While all bodies share the same fate, all voices do not.
• Brimming. That's what it is, I want to get to a place where my sentences enact brimming.
• I don't mind suffering as long as it's really about something. I don't mind great luck, if it's about something. If it's the hollow stuff,…

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