The Light of the World Quotes

“The story seems to begin with catastrophe but in fact began earlier and is not a tragedy but rather a love story. Perhaps tragedies are only tragedies in the presence of love, which confers meaning to loss. Loss is not felt in the absence of love.”
― Elizabeth Alexander, The Light of the World

“Art replaces the light that is lost when the day fades, the moment passes, the evanescent extraordinary makes its quicksilver. Art tries to capture that which we know leaves us, as we move in and out of each other’s lives, as we all must eventually leave this earth. Great artists know that shadow, work always against the dying light, but always knowing that the day brings new light and that the ocean which washes away all traces on the sand leaves us a new canvas with each wave.”
― Elizabeth Alexander, The Light of the World

“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final. Don’t let yourself lose me. Nearby is the country they call life. You will know it by its seriousness. Give me your hand.”
― Elizabeth Alexander, The Light of the World

“I have not yet learned to use our television DVR. One of the points of marriage is that you split labor. In the olden days that meant one hunted and one gathered; now it means one knows where the tea-towels are kept and the other knows how to program the DVR, for why should we both have to know?”
― Elizabeth Alexander, The Light of the World

“In the absence of organized religion, faith abounds, in the form of song and art and food and strong arms.”
― Elizabeth Alexander, The Light of the World

“To live in memory and in dreams is a cruel comfort.”
― Elizabeth Alexander, The Light of the World

“They shared an unshakeable belief in beauty, in overflow, in everythingness, the bursting, indelible beauty in a world where there is so much suffering and wounding and pain.”
― Elizabeth Alexander, The Light of the World

“It’s a fact: black people in this country die more easily, at all ages, across genders. Look at how young black men die, and how middle-aged black men drop dead, and how black women are ravaged by HIV/AIDS. The numbers graft to poverty but they also graph to stresses known and invisible. How did we come here, after all? Not with upturned chins and bright eyes but rather in chains, across a chasm. But what did we do? We built a nation, and we built its art.”
― Elizabeth Alexander, The Light of the World

“For loss is our common denominator. None of us will escape it. None of us will outrun death. What do we do in the space between that is our lives? What is the quality and richness of our lives? How do we move through struggle and let community hold us when we have been laid low? This”
― Elizabeth Alexander, The Light of the World

“Loss is not felt in the absence of love.”
― Elizabeth Alexander, The Light of the World

“Each of us made it possible for the other. We got something done. Each believed in the other unsurpassingly.”
― Elizabeth Alexander, The Light of the World

“It happened; it is part of who we are; it is our beauty and our terror. We must be gleaners from what life has set before us.”
― Elizabeth Alexander, The Light of the World

“Death comes with a gift in the poem; our loved ones tell us here that what we see with our eyes is different from what we know: “The things/themselves.” “Oh, at last” is the moment of exaltation in the poem. Lamentation and exaltation are simultaneous here.”
― Elizabeth Alexander, The Light of the World

“Have you located your passion as if this was your last night on earth?”
― Elizabeth Alexander, The Light of the World

“Each of us made it possible for the other. We got something done. Each believed in the other unsurpassingly. In all marriages there is struggle and ours was no different in that regard. But we always came to the other shore, dusted off, and said, There you are, my love.”
― Elizabeth Alexander, The Light of the World

“I been in sorrow’s kitchen and done licked out all the pots. Nobody knows the trouble I seen. Steal away to Jesus. I ain’t got long to stay here.”
― Elizabeth Alexander, The Light of the World

“Now I know for sure the soul is an evanescent thing and the body is its temporary container, because I saw it. I saw the body with the soul in it, I saw the body with the soul leaving, and I saw the body with the soul gone.”
― Elizabeth Alexander, The Light of the World

“How do you start again and carry the past within you? Why is it important to carry that with us?”
― Elizabeth Alexander, The Light of the World

“But the friendship part of marriage, that is the part that is enacted, that is the part for which you need the person present, and that is what I miss.”
― Elizabeth Alexander, The Light of the World

“Perhaps tragedies are only tragedies in the presence of love, which confers meaning to loss.”
― Elizabeth Alexander, The Light of the World

“Sorrow like vapor, sorrow like smoke, sorrow like quicksand, sorrow like an ocean, sorrow louder and fuller than the church songs, sorrow everywhere with nowhere to go.”
― Elizabeth Alexander, The Light of the World

“I was a ten in sadness when I was crying, Mommy, but now I am a six. Whoops, he says, it just went down to five. He comes out of the shower and puts on his pajamas. Now it’s just a three. He brushes his teeth. Now it’s all gone, he says. We were with Daddy when he died.”
― Elizabeth Alexander, The Light of the World

“Flowers live, they are perfect and they affect us; they are God’s glory, they make us know why we are alive and human, that we behold. They are beautiful, and then they die and rot and go back to the earth that gave birth to them.”
― Elizabeth Alexander, The Light of the World

“The days are long but the years are short," some say, about the early years of child rearing”
― Elizabeth Alexander, The Light of the World

“And so i write to fix him in place, to pass time in his company, to make sure I remember, even though I know I will never forget.”
― Elizabeth Alexander, The Light of the World

“I wake up grateful, for life is a gift.”
― Elizabeth Alexander, The Light of the World

“The basket of remembrance has three sides; one is open, can it tilt and spill out?”
― Elizabeth Alexander, The Light of the World

“every shut eye ain’t asleep, every goodbye ain’t gone.”
― Elizabeth Alexander, The Light of the World

“Henry Ford believed the soul of a person is located in their last breath and so captured the last breath of his best friend Thomas Edison in a test tube and kept it evermore.”
― Elizabeth Alexander, The Light of the World

“My mother-in-law’s last night on earth, a fox crossed our path in Branford, Connecticut, as we left the hospice. We knew somehow that it was her, as I now know the ravenous hawk came to take Ficre. Do I believe that? Yes, I do. Poetic logic is my logic. I do not believe she was a fox. But I believe the fox was a harbinger. I believe that it was a strange enough occurrence that it should be heeded. Zememesh Berhe, the quick, red fox, soon passed from this life to the next.”
― Elizabeth Alexander, The Light of the World