Ada Limon Quotes

#1. But what I forgot was that it was our plan, not hers, not the one doing the dying, this was a plan for those who still had a next. See, our job was simple: keep on living. Her job was harder, the hardest.

Ada Limon

#2. What I didn't like was how people talked to me
now that I was no longer single; they were nicer.
Men who never looked at me would start up a conversation,
like I was suddenly some safer form of fire.

Ada Limon

#3. I'm thirty-five and remember all that I've done wrong.

Ada Limon

#4. People have done this before, but not us.

Ada Limon

#5. Don't think about Laika in orbit. Don't think about cringe and catastrophe.

Ada Limon

#6. There remains the mystery of how the pupil devours so much bastard beauty. Abandoned property.

This land and I are rewilding.

Ada Limon

#7. Think crucial hanging.
Think crayon orange.
There is one low, leaning
heart-shaped globe left
and dearest, can you
tell, I am trying
to love you less.

Ada Limon

#8. If we could light up the room with pain,
we'd be such a glorious fire.

Ada Limon

#9. Not so much living, but a hovering without sense.

Ada Limon

#10. I am not obsessing.
I am just sitting here
perforating this post-it
with a push-pin.

Ada Limon

#11. I swear, I'll try harder not to miss as much: the tree, or how your fingers under still sleep-stunned sheets coaxed all my colors back.

Ada Limon

#12. ...this life is a fist
of fast wishes caught by nothing
but the fishhook of tomorrow's tug.

Ada Limon

#13. My mother's psychic says, everyone essentially wants
the same thing as everyone else, a sense of belonging, a coming home.

Ada Limon

#14. No one wants to be remembered for their death, or rather, I don't. So why do I remember hers and remember hers? I

Ada Limon

#15. Here it is: the new way of living with the world inside of us so we cannot lose it, and we cannot be lost. You and me are us and then, and it and sky.

Ada Limon

#16. Here is my sacrifice: my hummingbird landing in a stranger's palm.

Ada Limon

#17. All night I dreamt of bonfires and burn piles
and ghosts of men, and spirits
behind those birds of flame.
I cannot tell anymore when a door opens or closes,
I can only hear the frame saying, Walk through.

Ada Limon

#18. Maybe my limbs are made
mostly for decoration,
like the way I feel about
persimmons.

Ada Limon

#19. I want to give you something, or I want to take something from you. But I want to feel the exchange, the warm hand on the shoulder, the song coming out and the ear holding onto it.

Ada Limon

#20. Desire is a tricky thing, the boiling of the body's wants,

Ada Limon

#21. I wanted to be a hummingbird.
It made sense to long for rapid wings and the ability to hover always
to be Huitzilopochtli taming my snakes.
Sometimes though, the thought exhausts me and
I want to be a slow horse, a tennis shoe.

Ada Limon

#22. There are so many people who've come before us,
arrows and wagon wheels, obsidian tools, buffalo.
Look out at the meadow, you can almost see them,
generations dissolved in the bluegrass and hay.
I want to try and be terrific. Even for an hour.

Ada Limon