Bright Dead Things
Ada Limon
Top 10 Best Quotes
“I'm learning so many different ways to be quiet. There's how I stand in the lawn, that's one way. There's also how I stand in the field across from the street, that's another way because I'm farther from people and therefore more likely to be alone. There's how I don't answer the phone, and how I sometimes like to lie down on the floor in the kitchen and pretend I'm not home when people knock. There's daytime silent where I stare, and a nighttime silent when I do things. There's shower silent and bath silent and California silent and Kentucky silent and car silent and then there's the silence that comes back, a million times bigger than me, sneaks into my bones and wails and wails and wails until I can't be quiet anymore. That's how this machine works.”
“If we could light up the room with pain, we’d be such a glorious fire.”
“I imagine what it must be like to stay hidden, disappear in the dusky nothing and stay still in the night. It’s not sadness, though it may sound like it. I’m thinking about people and trees and how I wish I could be silent more, be more tree than anything else, less clumsy and loud, less crow, more cool white pine, and how it’s hard not to always want something else, not just to let the savage grass grow.”
“I remembered what had been circling in me: I am beautiful. I am full of love. I am dying.”
“I want to give you something, or I want to take something from you. But I want to feel the exchange, the warm hand on the shoulder, the song coming out and the ear holding onto it.”
“Here it is: the new way of living with the world inside of us so we cannot lose it, and we cannot be lost.”
“I like the lady horses best, how they make it all look easy, like running 40 miles per hour is as fun as taking a nap, or grass. I like their lady horse swagger, after winning. Ears up, girls, ears up! But mainly, let’s be honest, I like that they’re ladies. As if this big dangerous animal is also a part of me, that somewhere inside the delicate skin of my body, there pumps an 8-pound female horse heart, giant with power, heavy with blood. Don’t you want to believe it? Don’t you want to lift my shirt and see the huge beating genius machine that thinks, no, it knows, it’s going to come in first.”
“People have done this before, but not us.”
“I'm thirty-five and remember all that I've done wrong.”
“What I didn't like was how people talked to me now that I was no longer single; they were nicer. Men who never looked at me would start up a conversation, like I was suddenly some safer form of fire.”
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Book Keywords:
dangerous, regret, horses, winning, being-lost, poem, women, swagger, single, victory, quietness, power, past, first-time, stillness, silence, pain, age, living, trees, attached, life, people, poetry, bright-dead-things, sin, humanity, desires, world, men, first-place, fire, ladies
