Li-Young Lee Quotes

10 Sourced Quotes

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
And I never believed that the multitude / of dreams and many words were vain.

Li-Young Lee
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
I am that last, that final thing, the body in a white sheet listening,

Li-Young Lee
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
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
Brimming. That's what it is, I want to get to a place where my sentences enact brimming.

Li-Young Lee
To pull the metal splinter from my palm my father recited a story in a low voice. I watched his lovely face and not the blade. Before the story ended, he'd removed the iron sliver I thought I'd die from. I can't remember the tale, but hear his voice still, a well of dark water, a prayer. And I recall his hands, two measures of tenderness he laid against my face.

Li-Young Lee
A bruise, blue in the muscle, you impinge upon me. As bone hugs the ache home, so I'm vexed to love you, your body the shape of returns, your hair a torso of light, your heat I must have, your opening I'd eat, each moment of that soft-finned fruit, inverted fountain in which I don't see me.

Li-Young Lee
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