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“Poetry’s purpose is singular, to celebrate the troubled relation of the word to what it represents. It’s a rivalry between the two, and the poet unites them!”
“Every poem is a revolt. Anything less isn’t worth my time.”
That’s right: while I’d fought hard these many months to earn a place among you all, the table just gave Sylvia a seat.
believed Aurelia’s tears, though they weren’t tears of grief, just self-pity, and this angered me.
sometimes giving someone what they want is the only move we have in this game of listening and pivoting and dancing.
What I knew about Ted was that he came upon his notoriety riding a wave of seemingly effortless talent. One minute he was a simple rose gardener, and the next the so-called poet of a generation.
Freud once said that of all human obsessions, the strongest is a desire to habitually rely on memory, when the truth is that memory is full of holes. We fill those holes with ghosts.
Truly, there is nothing poetic, or remotely musical even, about the way men make love.
“Well, you can’t have advancements in thought or science without some sort of corollary or pushback. It’s the law of relativity. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Physics applies, even in an asylum.”
“truth isn’t the same as honesty.”
Marriage is the abandonment of the intellectual and the thinking self.”
perhaps loss itself is a kind of intervention, a way to confront the fact we hold no power over much in life except over how we respond to powerlessness.
we can’t help but feel everything. The thing is, at some point I just realized the trick wasn’t to close off my heart, but to instead allow myself to feel the world in its entirety.”
We see what we want to see. And what do I see today? I see a woman who, through her words, was a custodian of a world she no longer fit in, and never really did.
When he raised his head and looked at me, he said rather plainly, “I don’t know what rumors you’ve heard, but I’m sure there’s a hint of truth to all of them.”
When people are torn from us, all we have left are objects, the remains of what we have lost and given up.
