The Hurting Kind Quotes

“Before, the only thing I was interested in was love, how it grips you, how it terrifies you, how it annihilates and resuscitates you. I didn’t know then that it wasn’t even love that I was interested in but my own suffering. I thought suffering kept things interesting. How funny that I called it love and the whole time it was pain.”
― Ada Limon, The Hurting Kind: Poems

“I have always been too sensitive, a weeper
from a long line of weepers.
I am the hurting kind. I keep searching for proof.”
― Ada Limon, The Hurting Kind: Poems

“Mercy is not frozen in time, but flits about frantically, unsure where to land.”
― Ada Limon, The Hurting Kind: Poems

“dishes piled in the sink, books littering the coffee table— are harder than others. Today, my head is packed with cockroaches, dizziness, and everywhere it hurts. Venom in the jaw, behind the eyes, between the blades. Still, the dog is snoring on my right, the cat, on my left. Outside, all those redbuds are just getting good. I tell a friend, The body is so body. And she nods. I used to like the darkest stories, the bleak snippets someone would toss out about just how bad it could get. My stepfather told me a story about when he lived on the streets as a kid, how hed, some nights, sleep under the grill at a fast food restaurant until both he and his buddy got fired. I used to like that story for some reason, something in me that believed in overcoming. But right now all I want is a story about human kindness, the way once, when I couldn’t stop crying because I was fifteen and heartbroken, he came in and made me eat a small pizza he’d cut up into tiny bites until the tears stopped. Maybe I was just hungry, I said. And he nodded, holding out the last piece.”
― Ada Limon, The Hurting Kind: Poems

“It is what we do in order to care for things,
make them
ourselves, our elders, our beloveds, our
unborn.
But perhaps that is a lazy kind of love. Why
can't I just love the flower for being a
flower?
How many flowers have I yanked to puppet
as if it was easy for the world to make
flowers?”
― Ada Limon, The Hurting Kind: Poems

“There is a solitude in this world
I cannot pierce. I would die for it.”
― Ada Limon, The Hurting Kind: Poems

“Staring at the tree for a long time now, I am reminded of the righteousness I had before the scorch of time. I miss who I was. I miss who we all were, before we were this: half-alive to the brightening sky, half-dead already. I place my hand on the unscarred bark that is cool and unsullied, and because I cannot apologize to the tree, to my own self I say, I am sorry. I am sorry I have been so reckless with your life.”
― Ada Limon, The Hurting Kind: Poems

“I thought power was something you could control. Something one could do at a desk or on a job site, to work in the field of power. Now the tree is gone. The men are gone, just a ground-down stump where what felt like wisdom once was.”
― Ada Limon, The Hurting Kind: Poems

“You can’t sum it up, my mother says as we are driving and the electronic voice repeats, Turn Left onto Wildwood Canyon Road,

so I turn left, happy for the mundane instructions. Let us robot at once.

Tell me where to go. Tell me how to get there.

She means a life, of course. You cannot sum it up.”
― Ada Limon, The Hurting Kind: Poems

“a clean honesty
about our otherness that feels
not like the moral but the story.”
― Ada Limon, The Hurting Kind: Poems

“I want that. That kind of reeling in the wind. All the loose dry teeth, all the old bones of the skull, all the world, and the figure swaying with its stick to make untuned music even death cannot deny.”
― Ada Limon, The Hurting Kind: Poems

“JOINT CUSTODY Why did I never see it for what it was: abundance? Two families, two different kitchen tables, two sets of rules, two creeks, two highways, two stepparents with their fish tanks or eight-tracks or cigarette smoke or expertise in recipes or reading skills. I cannot reverse it, the record scratched and stopping to that original chaotic track. But let me say, I was taken back and forth on Sundays and it was not easy but I was loved each place. And so I have two brains now. Two entirely different brains. The one that always misses where I’m not, and the one that is so relieved to finally be home.”
― Ada Limon, The Hurting Kind: Poems

“And today, just when I could not stand myself any longer, a group of field sparrows, which were actually field sparrows, flew up into the bare branches of hackberry and I almost collapsed: leaves reattaching themselves to the tree like a strong spell for reversal.”
― Ada Limon, The Hurting Kind: Poems

“It is what we do in order to care for things,
make them
ourselves, our elders, our beloveds, our
unborn.
But perhaps that is a lazy kind of love. Why
can't I just love the flowers for being a
flower?
How many flowers have I yanked to puppet
as if it was easy for the world to make
flowers?”
― Ada Limon, The Hurting Kind: Poems

“making music like resurrection or haunting or just plain need.”
― Ada Limon, The Hurting Kind: Poems

“The true and serious beauty
of trees, how it seemed insane that they should
offer this to us, how unworthy we were, bewildered,
how soon we were nearly weeping at their trunks
as they tossed down petal after petal, and we tried
to remember how it felt to receive and notice
the receiving, pink, pink, pink, pink, pink.”
― Ada Limon, The Hurting Kind: Poems

“Fireworks in the background like an incongruous soundtrack, either celebratory or ominous, a veil of smoke behind a neighbor’s house, the air askew with booms.”
― Ada Limon, The Hurting Kind: Poems

“Darling Cockroaches of the Highest Order, hard underthings of hard underworlds, I am utterly suspicious of advice.”
― Ada Limon, The Hurting Kind: Poems

“I want them to go on kissing, without fear. I want to watch them and not feel so abandoned by hands. Come home. Everything is begging you.”
― Ada Limon, The Hurting Kind: Poems

“I was planting my secret seeds inside you.”
― Ada Limon, The Hurting Kind: Poems

“To think there was a time I thought birds were kind of boring. Brown bird. Gray bird. Black bird. Blah blah blah bird. Then, I started to learn their names by the ocean, and the person I was dating said, That’s the problem with you, Limón, you’re all fauna and no flora. And I began to learn the names of trees. I like to call things as they are. Before, the only thing I was interested in was love, how it grips you, how it terrifies you, how it annihilates and resuscitates you. I didn’t know then that it wasn’t even love that I was interested in but my own suffering. I thought suffering kept things interesting. How funny that I called it love and the whole time it was pain.”
― Ada Limon, The Hurting Kind: Poems

“Years later, back from Mexico or South America, he’d admit he was tired of history, of always discovering the ruin by ruining it, wrecking a forest for a temple, a temple that should be simply left a temple. He wanted it all to stay as it was, even if it went undiscovered. I want to honor a man who wants to hold a wild thing, only for a second, long enough to admire it fully, and then wants to watch it safely return to its life, bends to be sure the grass closes up behind it.”
― Ada Limon, The Hurting Kind: Poems

“Could you refuse me if I asked you to point again at the horizon, to tell me something was worth waiting for?”
― Ada Limon, The Hurting Kind: Poems

“What is it to be seen in the right way? As who you are? A flash of color, a blur in the crowd, something spectacular but untouchable.”
― Ada Limon, The Hurting Kind: Poems

“What to root for, what to root for, I rub
my hands together and eye the surroundings.”
― Ada Limon, The Hurting Kind: Poems

“My stepfather told me a story about when he lived on the streets as a kid, how hed, some nights, sleep under the grill at a fast food restaurant until both he and his buddy got fired. I used to like that story for some reason, something in me that believed in overcoming. But right now all I want is a story about human kindness, the way once, when I couldn’t stop crying because I was fifteen and heartbroken, he came in and made me eat a small pizza he’d cut up into tiny bites until the tears stopped. Maybe I was just hungry, I said. And he nodded, holding out the last piece.”
― Ada Limon, The Hurting Kind: Poems

“OPEN WATER”
― Ada Limon, The Hurting Kind: Poems

“Two female horses, retired mares, separated by a sliding barn door, nose each other. Neither of them will get pregnant again, their job is to just be a horse.”
― Ada Limon, The Hurting Kind: Poems

“...enough of can you see me, can you hear me, enough I am human, enough I am alone and I am desperate, enough of the animal saving me, enough of the high water, enough sorrow, enough of the air and its ease, I am asking you to touch me.”
― Ada Limon, The Hurting Kind: Poems

“GLIMPSE”
― Ada Limon, The Hurting Kind: Poems