Rae Armantrout > Quotes

“The fear
that all this
will end.
The fear
that it won’t.”
― Rae Armantrout

“A sense of mission lost
in ink's
jagged outcrops.

I was trying to tell myself
what I must have known
before

in a form
I wouldn't recognize at first.”
― Rae Armantrout, Next Life

“We are all full of discourses that we only half understand and half mean.”
― Rae Armantrout

“I know you by your willingness.”
― Rae Armantrout, Versed

“The feeling of emptiness is a pre-existing condition. Jargon forces intimacy.”
― Rae Armantrout, Versed

“So much happiness is caged in language, ready to burst out anytime and fade”
― Rae Armantrout, Versed

“Metaphor forms a crust beneath which the crevasse of each experience.”
― Rae Armantrout, Versed

“I'm composed largely of what the streets and rooms look like, of how to arrive 'just' here.”
― Rae Armantrout, Versed

“When I dreamed about flying,
it was as a skill
I needed to regain. ”
― Rae Armantrout, The Pretext

“Mozart creates a universe out of pleasantries.”
― Rae Armantrout, Versed

“Metaphor is ritual sacrifice. It kills the look-alike. No, metaphor is homeopathy.”
― Rae Armantrout, Versed

“We sleep together in the dark but confuse light with love.”
― Rae Armantrout, Versed

“Now light sits in the chairs”
― Rae Armantrout, Versed

“But here I hold your dream in my poem.”
― Rae Armantrout, Versed

“Simple


Complex systems can arise
from simple rules.

It's not
that we want to survive,
it's that we've been drugged
and made to act
as if we do

while all the while
the sea breaks
and rolls, painlessly, under.

If we're not copying it,
we're lonely.

Is this the knowledge
that demands to be
passed down?

Time is made from swatches
of heaven and hell.

If we're not killing it,
we're hungry.”
― Rae Armantrout, Versed

“this route is only one of several imaginary paths.”
― Rae Armantrout, Versed

“The new pop song
is about getting real:

"You had a bad day."
The camera don't lie.

But they're lying
to you
about the camera.”
― Rae Armantrout, Versed

“Perfect molecules of plastic sheet the seas.”
― Rae Armantrout, Versed

“Evening succeeds evening.”
― Rae Armantrout, Versed

“Carried by light, images remain while sensation is so evanescent as to be always beyond belief.”
― Rae Armantrout, Versed

“The jacaranda, for instance, is beautiful but not serious.”
― Rae Armantrout, Versed

“The future is all around here.' It's a place, anyplace where we don't exist.”
― Rae Armantrout, Versed

“Ends Meet


1
Could be
time is practice,

balance,

the action
executed in the mind
before and after.

Where does mind end?


2
We mark a break
with what has come before,

come through the door,

down the hatch.

Not a clean break
exactly.


3
Our life was rehearsal,
Mother almost said

so that we believed
we would escort her

to the future
where she could be happy.”
― Rae Armantrout, Money Shot

“A receipt blown crazily across the parking lot, was, perhaps, a moth.”
― Rae Armantrout, Versed

“To reinvent anomalous figments.”
― Rae Armantrout, Versed

“Proscenium of nearly identical mountain ridges, arched out and downward, one 'after' another, to the valley floor: curtains tied back, a gesture”
― Rae Armantrout, Versed

“What if I were turned on by seemingly innocent words such as “scumble,” “pinky,” or “extrapolate?” What if I maneuvered conversation in the hope that others would pronounce these words? Perhaps the excitement would come from the way the other person touched them lightly and carelessly with his tongue. What if “of” were such a hot button? “Scumble of bushes.” What if there were a hidden pleasure in calling one thing by another’s name?”
― Rae Armantrout, Versed

“I existed finally as the idea of temporal extension.”
― Rae Armantrout, Versed

“an undiscovered tumor squats on her kidney.”
― Rae Armantrout, Versed

“As a child,
I was abandoned

in a story
made of trees.

Here’s the small
gasp

of this clearing
come “upon” “again”
― Rae Armantrout