Top 30 Li-Young Lee Quotes
#1. My tongue remembers your wounded flavor.
The vein in my neck
adores you. A sword
stands up between my hips,
my hidden fleece sends forth its scent of human oil.
Li-Young Lee
#2. A poem is like a score for the human voice.
Li-Young Lee
#3. We suffer each other to have each other a while.
Li-Young Lee
#4. Could it be in longing we are most ourselves?
Li-Young Lee
#5. There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.
Li-Young Lee
#6. Maybe being winged means being wounded by infinity.
Li-Young Lee
#7. But, no one
can tell without cease
our human
story, and so we
lose, lose
Li-Young Lee
#9. Some things never leave a person:
scent of the hair of one you love,
the texture of persimmons,
in your palm, the ripe weight.
Li-Young Lee
#10. In the uproar, the confusion
of accents and inflections
how will you hear me when I open my mouth?
Look for me, one of the drab population
under fissured edifices, fractured
artifices. Make my various
names flock overhead,
I will follow you.
Li-Young Lee
#11. 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.
Li-Young Lee
#12. Brimming. That's what it is, I want to get to a place where my sentences enact brimming.
Li-Young Lee
#13. 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.
Li-Young Lee
#14. The knowledge that it takes to write a poem gets burnt up in the writing of the poem.
Li-Young Lee
#15. Memory is sweet.
Even when it's painful, memory is sweet.
Li-Young Lee
#16. 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.
Li-Young Lee
#17. People who read poetry have heard about the burning bush, but when you write poetry, you sit inside the burning bush.
Li-Young Lee
#18. And of all the rooms in my childhood,
God was the largest
and most empty.
Li-Young Lee
#19. Moonlight and high wind.
Dark poplars toss, insinuate the sea.
Li-Young Lee
#20. 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.
Li-Young Lee
#21. And I never believed that the multitude / of dreams and many words were vain.
Li-Young Lee
#22. The lyric self is the self; the narrative self is not.
Li-Young Lee
#23. Poetry is the language of extremity. Poetry is a transfer of potency. You feel something potent and then you transfer it onto the page.
Li-Young Lee
#24. The earth is flat. Those who fall off don't return. The earth is round. All things reveal themselves to men only gradually. I
Li-Young Lee
#25. I am that last, that final thing, the body in a white sheet listening,
Li-Young Lee
#26. While all bodies share the same fate, all voices do not.
Li-Young Lee
#27. Water has invaded my father's heart, swollen, heavy, twice as large. Bloated liver. Bloated legs. The feet have become balloons. A respirator mask makes him look like a diver. When I lay my face against his - the sound of water returning. The
Li-Young Lee
#28. Every time you write a poem it's apocalyptic. You're revealing who you really are to yourself.
Li-Young Lee
#29. 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.
Li-Young Lee
#30. In writing poetry, all of one's attention is focused on some inner voice.
Li-Young Lee
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