Jorie Graham Quotes

#1. The way things work / is that eventually / something catches.

Jorie Graham

#2. Love / is turning out the lights when others do, a curfew we / would take / for sails.

Jorie Graham

#3. A poem is a private story, after all, no matter how apparently public. The reader is always overhearing a confession.

Jorie Graham

#4. If there is anything I love most, in the poems I love, it is the audible braiding of that bravery, that essential empty-handedness, and that willingness to be taken by surprise, all in one voice.

Jorie Graham

#5. And angle of vision, dust, gravity, solitude,
and the part of the law which is the world's waiting
and the part of the law which is my waiting,
and the part which is my impatience - now; now?
though there are, there really are
things in the world, you must believe me.

Jorie Graham

#6. There are moments in our lives which, threaded, give us heaven -

Jorie Graham

#7. The storm: I close my eyes and, standing in it, try to make it mine.

Jorie Graham

#8. Where mathematics and spirit join, where proof of the existence of mystery-salvific mystery-shimmers just below the surfaces of human perception, experience and the linguistic veil itself, Killarney Clary's new book-her best to date-dwells, plumbs, persuades and thrills.

Jorie Graham

#9. The primary function of the creative use of language - in our age - is to try to constantly restore words to their meanings, to keep the living tissue of responsibility alive.

Jorie Graham

#10. Brilliant, hard-earned and honest. The erasures and reappearances of figure and ground-that hard drama-have rarely been so movingly undertaken. A heartbreakingly beautiful work.

Jorie Graham

#11. This is freedom. This is the force of faith. Nobody gets what they want. Never again are you the same. The longing
is to be pure. What you get is to be changed.

Jorie Graham

#12. Oh how we want
to be taken
and changed,
want to be mended
by what we enter.

Jorie Graham

#13. Towards the end of the season it is not bad to have the body. To have experienced joy as the mere lifting of hunger is not to have known it less.

Jorie Graham