Brenda Shaughnessy Quotes
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I've been melted into something too easy to spill. I make more and more of myself in order to make more and more of the baby. He takes it, this making. And somehow he's made more of me, too.
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Strength means honoring your entire range of emotion, even your despair and heartbreak.
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And now we eat. The eponymous eating. Don't want butter, don't want salt. Dinner is thinner but it's not my fault.
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I do see the poet as someone whose role it is to push back against anti-intellectualism, anti-activism, and passivity in general. The purpose of this pushing back is to show that there are always infinite sides to a story, amazing unimagined perspectives on any narrative, and no limit to how weird and wild and unexpected our language and its meanings can get.
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If the two meanings of 'heart' are 'center' and 'part,' then the word 'art' also forms a perplexing doubleness: it is something human-made with materials; that is, it is made of us. Art is life. And yet it is distinct from 'life.' Art is life's counterpoint. We make it, and in that making, art is pointedly not life. It is just made of us.
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Death and life are, for most of us, too complex to comprehend, but Alex Lemon can pretty casually, accurately, and marvelously correlate them to heavy metal and birthday cake.
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I came to see that what constitutes strength is not just a muscle or will. It can also include the most desperate vulnerability, the saddest heartache, the lightest, sweetest laughter.
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Strength means...acknowledging each of those feelings, your questions and ideas and faith and terror, and meeting what comes with the full force of your heart.
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What if all possible pain was only the grief of truth?
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Where can we go if not to each other, resenting every step?
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All gifts are riddles, all lives/are in the middle of mother-lives.
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You are not broken. You break again and again because that's what breaking means. To be whole.
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When a woman you love hits you on the head with a book you love, is that love?
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It seems unlikely that so much literature could be made from twenty-six letters. Doesn't it seem it could all be boiled down to one sentence?