Elizabeth Alexander Quotes

#1. Now I know for sure the soul is an evanescent thing and the body is its temporary container, because I saw it. I saw the body with the soul in it, I saw the body with the soul leaving, and I saw the body with the soul gone.

Elizabeth Alexander

#2. Now I know my capacity for awe
is infinite: this thirst is permanent,
the well bottomless, my good fortune vast.

Elizabeth Alexander

#3. The days are long but the years are short," some say, about the early years of child rearing

Elizabeth Alexander

#4. Using the voice is a physical act, one that first announces the existence of the body of residence and then trumpets its arrival in a public space.

Elizabeth Alexander

#5. I been in sorrow's kitchen and done licked out all the pots. Nobody knows the trouble I seen. Steal away to Jesus. I ain't got long to stay here.

Elizabeth Alexander

#6. In all marriages there is struggle and ours was no different in that regard. But we always came to the other shore, dusted off, and said, There you are, my love.

Elizabeth Alexander

#7. They shared an unshakeable belief in beauty, in overflow, in everythingness, the bursting, indelible beauty in a world where there is so much suffering and wounding and pain.

Elizabeth Alexander

#8. It happened; it is part of who we are; it is our beauty and our terror. We must be gleaners from what life has set before us.

Elizabeth Alexander

#9. Soon the two children will walk down Edgehill Road from the bus stop like burros under their knapsacks,

Elizabeth Alexander

#10. Poetry is what you find
in the dirt in the corner,
overhear on the bus, God
in the details, the only way
to get from here to there.

Elizabeth Alexander

#11. I have not yet learned to use our television DVR. One of the points of marriage is that you split labor. In the olden days that meant one hunted and one gathered; now it means one knows where the tea-towels are kept and the other knows how to program the DVR, for why should we both have to know?

Elizabeth Alexander

#12. Half of the things are as they seem. The other half, who knows. This has always been true.

Elizabeth Alexander

#13. The basket of remembrance has three sides; one is open, can it tilt and spill out?

Elizabeth Alexander

#14. every shut eye ain't asleep, every goodbye ain't gone.

Elizabeth Alexander

#15. Everything was told! Then we could begin something new.

Elizabeth Alexander

#16. Each of us made it possible for the other. We got something done. Each believed in the other unsurpassingly.

Elizabeth Alexander

#17. In the absence of organized religion, faith abounds, in the form of song and art and food and strong arms.

Elizabeth Alexander

#18. The story seems to begin with catastrophe but in fact began earlier and is not a tragedy but rather a love story. Perhaps tragedies are only tragedies in the presence of love, which confers meaning to loss. Loss is not felt in the absence of love.

Elizabeth Alexander