Mary Szybist Quotes

#1. Without you my air tastes like nothing. For you I hold my breath.

Mary Szybist

#2. Writing poems is a chance to construct spaces that I want to imaginatively inhabit.

Mary Szybist

#3. Sometimes I have a hard time distinguishing between faith and hope.

Mary Szybist

#4. I think that a good deal of poetry and art gives us some sense of access to another's voice, perception, texture of thought, imagination. Sometimes it gives us better access to the strangeness in ourselves.

Mary Szybist

#5. Days go by when I do nothing but underline the damp edge of myself.

Mary Szybist

#6. When I was young, I reached a point where I found myself unable to pray. I was devastated by it. I missed being able to say words in my head that I believed could be heard by a being, a consciousness outside me. That is when I turned to poetry.

Mary Szybist

#7. Form is endlessly interesting to me, and I love poetry as a formal enterprise.

Mary Szybist

#8. There's plenty that poetry cannot do, but the miracle, of course, is how much it can do, how much it does do.

Mary Szybist

#9. I do not believe in the beauty of falling.

Mary Szybist

#10. You can't have two worlds in your hands
and choose emptiness.

Mary Szybist

#11. I turn to poems to find spaces that might enlarge, rather than distill, experience.

Mary Szybist

#12. If I could/bind myself to this moment, to the slow//snare of its scent/what would it matter if I became//just the flutter of page/in a text someone turns//to examine me/in the wrong color?

Mary Szybist