Brenda Shaughnessy Quotes

United States, Poet
March 21, 1970

Brenda Shaughnessy is the author of five poetry collections, including The Octopus Museum (coming in March 2019 from Knopf); So Much Synth (2016, Copper Canyon Press); Our Andromeda (2012), which was a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award, The International Griffin Prize, and the PEN Open Book Award. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Harpers, The New York Times, The New Yorker, O Magazine, Paris Review, Poetry Magazine, and elsewhere. She lives in Verona NJ with her family.

And now we eat. The eponymous eating. Don't want butter, don't want salt. Dinner is thinner but it's not my fault.

Brenda Shaughnessy
- Dinner
- Fault
- Butter
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.

Brenda Shaughnessy

Strength means honoring your entire range of emotion, even your despair and heartbreak.

Brenda Shaughnessy
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.

Brenda Shaughnessy
- Art
- Human
- Making
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.

Brenda Shaughnessy
- Baby
- Spill
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.

Brenda Shaughnessy
- Language
- Role
- Pushing
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.

Brenda Shaughnessy
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.

Brenda Shaughnessy
- Heart
- Ideas
- Terror

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?

Brenda Shaughnessy
All gifts are riddles, all lives/are in the middle of mother-lives.

Brenda Shaughnessy
- Mother
- Gifts
When a woman you love hits you on the head with a book you love, is that love?

Brenda Shaughnessy
- Love
- Woman
- Hits
What if all possible pain was only the grief of truth?

Brenda Shaughnessy
- Truth
- Pain
- Grief
Where can we go if not to each other, resenting every step?

Brenda Shaughnessy
- Step
How anyone becomes herself/is a mystery.

Brenda Shaughnessy
- Mystery

You are not broken. You break again and again because that's what breaking means. To be whole.

Brenda Shaughnessy
- Break