Words of Hope

Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us. These, our bodies, possessed by light. Tell me we'll never get used to it.

Never cut what you can untie.

I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me.

I am under no obligation to make sense to you.

Until the lion learns how to write, every story will glorify the hunter.

May I write words more naked than flesh, stronger than bone, more resilient than sinew, sensitive than nerve.

What a marvelous feeling it would be, if we could say exactly how we felt. What a monumental victory. What a terrifying thought.

I shiver, thinking how easy it is to be totally wrong about people, to see one tiny part of them and confuse it with the whole.

But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned to a pillar of salt. So it goes. People aren't supposed to look back. I'm certainly not going to do it anymore.

Nothing ever ends poetically. It ends and we turn it into poetry. All that blood was never once beautiful. It was always just red.

And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.

Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself; I am large- I contain multitudes.

So if you are too tired to speak, sit next to me, because I, too, am fluent in silence.

I looked at everyone and wondered where they came from, and who they missed, and what they were sorry for.

I understand now that I'm not a mess, but a deeply feeling person in a messy world. I explain that now, when someone asks me why I cry so often, I say, 'For the same reason I laugh so often-- because I'm paying attention.'