Dear Memory Quotes

“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

“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

“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

“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

“What's the rush?", you said about publishing. I added: "Does the world need another competent book of poems?" Most times, we wouldn't answer our own questions because what did we know? We only knew that we couldn't scrub poetry off our bodies. And we ourselves feared the greatest death, which was writing merely competent poems.”
― Victoria Chang, Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence and Grief

“If you saw my poems today, I hope you could see that I heard you even though you couldn't hear me. I have tried to write shorter + shorter + denser + denser + louder + louder poems. They have become so loud that each night I fold them into origamic cigarettes and smoke them so they'll blow away.”
― Victoria Chang, Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence and Grief

“You told me that suffering can deepen and expand a poet's work. And that sometimes suffering can put so much pressure on a person that they have no choice but to become a poet.”
― Victoria Chang, Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence and Grief

“I am seeking whatever is painful in my body, whatever is joyful. While seeking, I may never find myself. While seeking, I have no idea what form I may take or whether anyone, including myself, will ever like what I write. Most of writing feels like walking in the dark. I'm reminded of what Donald Barthelme said: The writer is that person who, embarking upon her task, does not know what to do.”
― Victoria Chang, Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence and Grief