Li-Young Lee Quotes

A poem is like a score for the human voice.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Maybe being winged means being wounded by infinity.

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

The knowledge that it takes to write a poem gets burnt up in the writing of the poem.

We suffer each other to have each other a while.

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.

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

While all bodies share the same fate, all voices do not.

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.

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