Jorie Graham Quotes

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

“This is freedom. This is the face 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. More and more by
each glistening minute, through which infinity threads itself.
Also oblivion, of course, the aftershocks of something
at sea. Here hands full of sand, letting it
sift through
in the wind, I look in and say take this, hurry. And if I listen
now? Listen, I was not saying anything. It was only
something I did. I could not chose words. I am free to go.
I cannot, of course, come back. Not to this. Never.
It is a ghost posed on my lips. Here: never.”

— Jorie Graham

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

— Jorie Graham

“The feeling of being a digression not the link in the argument,
a new direction, an offshoot, the limb going on elsewhere,
and liking that error, a feeling of being capable because an error,
of being wrong perhaps altogether wrong a piece from another set
stripped of position stripped of true function
and loving that error, loving that filial form, that break from perfection
where the complex mechanism fails, where the stranger appears in the clearing,
out of nowhere and uncalled for, out of nowhere to share the day.”

— Jorie Graham

“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

“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

There is a feeling the body gives the mind
of having missed something, a bedrock poverty, like falling
without the sense that you are passing through one world,
that you could reach another
anytime. Instead the real
is crossing you,
your body an arrival
you know is false but can't outrun. And somewhere in between
these geese forever entering and
these spiders turning back,
this astonishing delay, the everyday, takes place.

— Jorie Graham

“I think I am probably in love with silence, that other world. And that I write, in some way, to negotiate seriously with it . Because there is, of course, always the desire, the hope, that they are not two separate worlds, sound and silence, but that they become each other, that only our hearing fails.”

— Jorie Graham

“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

“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

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

— Jorie Graham

“The way things work / is that eventually / something catches.”

— Jorie Graham

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

— Jorie Graham

“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

“Oh how we want
to be taken
and changed,
want to be mended
by what we enter.”

— Jorie Graham

“There are moments in our lives which, threaded, give us heaven-”

— Jorie Graham

“These are crystalline - oftentimes incandescent - translations of Juarroz's powerful metaphysical poems where eternity and silence jut up against a world where "writing infects the landscape" and there are "more letters than leaves" - The kind of match one hopes for where both the translator and the poet are in luck; new poems which don't leak and yet old poems in which the original passion shines.”

— Jorie Graham

“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