Victoria Chang > Quotes

“To love anyone means to admit extinction. I tell myself this, so I never fall in love, so that the fire lights just me.”
― Victoria Chang, Obit

“If you cut out a rectangle of a perfectly blue sky, no clouds, no wind, no birds, frame it with a blue frame, place it faceup on the floor of an empty museum with an open atrium to the sky, that is grief.”
― Victoria Chang, Obit

“Blame has no face. I have walked on its staircase, around and around, trying to slap its face but only hitting my own cheeks.”
― Victoria Chang, Obit

“My Mother’s Lungs—began their dying sometime in the past. Doctors talked around tombstones. About the hedges near the tombstones, the font. The obituary writer said the obituary is the moment when someone becomes history. What if my mother never told me stories about the war or about her childhood? Does that mean none of it happened? No one sits next to my mother’s small rectangular tombstone, flush to the earth. The stone is meant to be read from above. What if I’m in space and can’t read it? Does that mean she didn’t die? She died at 7:07 a.m. PST. It is three hours earlier in Hawaii. Does that mean in Hawaii she hasn’t died yet? But the plane ride to Hawaii is five hours long. This time gap can never be overcome. The difference is called grieving.”
― Victoria Chang, Obit

“The way memory is the ringing after a gunshot. The way we try to remember the gunshot but can’t. The way memory gets up after someone has died and starts walking.”
― Victoria Chang, Obit

“I now know that to be loved as child means to be watched. In high school, I loved when the teacher turned the lights off. A moment to feel loved and unseen at once. I understand now. We can't be loved when the lights are off.”
― Victoria Chang, Obit

“I always knew that grief was something I could smell. But I didn’t know that it’s not actually a noun but a verb. That it moves.”
― Victoria Chang, Obit

“Blame is just an echo of pain, a veil across the face of the one you blame. I blame God. I want to complain to the boss of God about God. What if the boss of God is rain and the only way to speak to rain is to open your mouth to the sky and drown?”
― Victoria Chang, Obit

“Before my mother's death, I sat anywhere. Now I look for the image of the empty chair near the image of the empty table. An image of me sits down. Depression is a glove over the heart. Depression is an image of a glove over the image of a heart.”
― Victoria Chang, Obit

“To acknowledge death is to acknowledge that we must take another shape.”
― Victoria Chang, Obit

“Depression is a glove over the heart. Depression is an image of a glove over the image of a heart.”
― Victoria Chang, Obit

“Sometimes all I have are words and to write them means they are no longer prayers but are now animals. Other people can hunt them.”
― Victoria Chang, Obit

“She switched places with her shadow because suffering changes shape and happens secretly.”
― Victoria Chang

“I know the heart doesn’t really shatter, but I also can no longer feel it.”
― Victoria Chang, Obit

“The way grief takes many forms, as tears or pinwheels. The way the word haystack never conjures up the same image twice. The way we assume all tears taste the same. The way our sadness is plural, but grief is singular.”
― Victoria Chang, Obit

“My mother did so much for me. What I returned to her were empty containers.”
― Victoria Chang, Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence and Grief

“My mother, now covered, was no longer my mother. A covered apple is no longer an apple. A sketch of a person isn’t the person. Somewhere, in the morning, my mother had become the sketch. And I would spend the rest of my life trying to shade her back in.”
― Victoria Chang, Obit

“The way memory gets up after someone has died and starts walking.”
― Victoria Chang, Obit

“As I write, more and more of my cells are replaced by language. When they burn a writer's body, the smoke will be shaped llike letters.”
― Victoria Chang, Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence and Grief

“To borrow Julia Creet's phrase, maybe "memory is where we have arrived rather than where we have left." ... I used to think I was a transcriber of my own experiences and memories, adding an image here and there, but now I think I am more of a shaper. I take small fragments of image, memory, silence, and thought, and shape them with imagninary hands into something different.”
― Victoria Chang, Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence and Grief

“The artist is only visiting pain, imagining it. We praise the artist, not the apple, not the apple's shadow, which is murdered slowly. There must be some way of drawing a picture so that it doesn't become an elegy.”
― Victoria Chang, Obit

“The way grief is really about future absence. The way the future closes its offices when a mother dies. What's left: a hole in the ground the size of violence.”
― Victoria Chang, Obit

“Maybe I am staring into a piece of paper like it is a pond, hoping one day that what looks back is not my own reflection, but my great-grandmother's face. Maybe poetry is the distance between my face and her face. Maybe it's the difference between how the moon looks in the sky and how it contorts when a mayfly travels across the pond.”
― Victoria Chang, Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence and Grief

“Love Poem with Peanut Shells"

Now I am in the warm oil of your mouth,
comfortably sleeping in your throat. We build
with flagstone, shop for sconces and radiance.
Your large hands bundle and stack wood into walls.
You digest my shape, unlit layer, lung. Light
begins here, where we are one decimal point, where
I stand with a cool blue hat that covers my eyes,
red shoes that drop anchor. Where we sit in bars
with peanut shells with Mikes and Leroys and Toms.
Where you counsel me on lips and throat. Where
you love the hiss of my atom. Where the ocean is zero
miles from everywhere. Here, madness has no map.
Here, God is abridged. 0 to be loved this way.
To have lips that bear fruit. To be cancelled.”
― Victoria Chang, Salvinia Molesta: Poems

“Passage

Every leaf that falls
never stops falling. I once
thought that leaves were leaves.
Now I think they are feeling,
in search of a place—
someone's hair, a park bench, a
finger. Isn't that
like us, going from place to
place, looking to be alive?”
― Victoria Chang, The Trees Witness Everything

“When a mother dies,
a house becomes a forest.
My children, children,
know that I am in the trees.
True love means you won’t find me.”
― Victoria Chang, Obit

“When I told my children, the three of us hugged in a circle, burst into tears. As if the tears were already there crying on their own and we, the newly bereaved, exploded into them.”
― Victoria Chang, Obit

“The way grief is really about future absence.”
― Victoria Chang, Obit

“This time gap can never be overcome. The difference is called grieving.”
― Victoria Chang, Obit

“Before this other stone appeared, my mother’s stone was still my mother because of the absence around her. The appearance of the new stone and the likeness to her stone implied my mother was a stone too, that my mother was buried under the stone too.”
― Victoria Chang, Obit