Best 30 quotes of Li-young Lee on MyQuotes

Li-young Lee

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    Li-young Lee

    A bruise, blue in the muscle, you impinge upon me. As bone hugs the ache home, so I'm vexed to love you, your body the shape of returns, your hair a torso of light, your heat I must have, your opening I'd eat, each moment of that soft-finned fruit, inverted fountain in which I don't see me.

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    Li-young Lee

    A door jumps out from shadows, then jumps away. This is what I've come to find: the back door, unlatched. Tooled by insular wind, it slams and slams without meaning to and without meaning.

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    Li-young Lee

    And I never believed that the multitude / of dreams and many words were vain.

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    Li-young Lee

    A poem is like a score for the human voice.

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    Li-young Lee

    Every time you write a poem it’s apocalyptic. You’re revealing who you really are to yourself.

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    Li-young Lee

    I am that last, that final thing, the body in a white sheet listening.

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    Li-young Lee

    I don't mind suffering as long as it's really about something. I don't mind great luck, if it's about something. If it's the hollow stuff, then there's no gift, one way or the other.

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    Li-young Lee

    In writing poetry, all of one's attention is focused on some inner voice.

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    Li-young Lee

    I've been thinking about something for a long time, and I keep noticing that most human speech-if not all human speech-is made with the outgoing breath. This is the strange thing about presence and absence. When we breath in, our bodies are filled with nutrients and nourishment. Our blood is filled with oxygen, our skin gets flush; our bones get harder-they get compacted. Our muscles get toned and we feel very present when we're breathing in. The problem is, that when we're breathing in, we can't speak. So presence and silence have something to do with each other.

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    Li-young Lee

    Maybe being winged means being wounded by infinity.

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    Li-young Lee

    Memory is sweet. Even when it’s painful, memory is sweet.

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    Li-young Lee

    Memory revises me. Even now a letter comes from a place I don’t know, from someone with my name and postmarked years ago, while I await injunctions from the light or the dark; I wait for shapeliness limned, or dissolution. Is paradise due or narrowly missed until another thousand years? I wait in a blue hour and faraway noise of hammering, and on a page a poem begun, something about to be dispersed, something about to come into being.

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    Li-young Lee

    Our bodies look solid, but they arent. Were like a fountain. A fountain of water looks solid, but you can put your fingers right through it. Our bodies look like things, but theres no thingness to them.

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    Li-young Lee

    People who read poetry have heard about the burning bush, but when you write poetry, you sit inside the burning bush.

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    Li-young Lee

    Poetry is the language of extremity. Poetry is a transfer of potency. You feel something potent and then you transfer it onto the page.

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    Li-young Lee

    Some things never leave a person: scent of the hair of one you love, the texture of persimmons, in your palm, the ripe weight.

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    Li-young Lee

    That's what I want, that kind of recklessness where the poem is even ahead of you. It's like riding a horse that's a little too wild for you, so there's this tension between what you can do and what the horse decides it's going to do.

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    Li-young Lee

    The lyric self is the self; the narrative self is not.

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    Li-young Lee

    The problem with memory is that is changes whatever it touches. It is never that accurate. As a result, I end up modifying and revising my own experiences. It's myth making.

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    Li-young Lee

    There are days we live as if death were nowhere in the background; from joy to joy to joy, from wing to wing, from blossom to blossom to impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

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    Li-young Lee

    To pull the metal splinter from my palm my father recited a story in a low voice. I watched his lovely face and not the blade. Before the story ended, he'd removed the iron sliver I thought I'd die from. I can't remember the tale, but hear his voice still, a well of dark water, a prayer. And I recall his hands, two measures of tenderness he laid against my face.

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    Li-young Lee

    And of all the rooms in my childhood, God was the largest and most empty.

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    Li-young Lee

    Dwelling As though touching her might make him known to himself, as though his hand moving over her body might find who he is, as though he lay inside her, a country his hand's traveling uncovered, as though such a country arose continually up out of her to meet his hand's setting forth and setting forth. And the places on her body have no names. And she is what's immense about the night. And their clothes on the floor are arranged for forgetfulness.

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    Li-young Lee

    Brimming. That's what it is, I want to get to a place where my sentences enact brimming.

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    Li-young Lee

    Have You Prayed” When the wind turns and asks, in my father’s voice, Have you prayed? I know three things. One: I’m never finished answering to the dead. Two: A man is four winds and three fires. And the four winds are his father’s voice, his mother’s voice . . . Or maybe he’s seven winds and ten fires. And the fires are seeing, hearing, touching, dreaming, thinking . . . Or is he the breath of God? When the wind turns traveler and asks, in my father’s voice, Have you prayed? I remember three things. One: A father’s love is milk and sugar, two-thirds worry, two-thirds grief, and what’s left over is trimmed and leavened to make the bread the dead and the living share. And patience? That’s to endure the terrible leavening and kneading. And wisdom? That’s my father’s face in sleep. When the wind asks, Have you prayed? I know it’s only me reminding myself a flower is one station between earth’s wish and earth’s rapture, and blood was fire, salt, and breath long before it quickened any wand or branch, any limb that woke speaking. It’s just me in the gowns of the wind, or my father through me, asking, Have you found your refuge yet? asking, Are you happy? Strange. A troubled father. A happy son. The wind with a voice. And me talking to no one.

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    Li-young Lee

    His love for me is like his sewing: various colors and too much thread, the stitching uneven.

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    Li-young Lee

    Moonlight and high wind. Dark poplars toss, insinuate the sea.

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    Li-young Lee

    My tongue remembers your wounded flavor. The vein in my neck adores you. A sword stands up between my hips, my hidden fleece sends forth its scent of human oil.

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    Li-young Lee

    We suffer each other to have each other a while.

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    Li-young Lee

    Where is his father? When will his mother be home? How is he going to explain the moon taken hostage, the sea risen to fill up all the mirrors? How is he going to explain the branches beginning to grow from his ribs and throat, the cries and trills starting in his own mouth? And now that ancient sorrow between his hips, his body’s ripe listening; the planet knowing itself at last.