Ada Limon Quotes & Sayings

I want to give you something, or I want to take something from you. But I want to feel the exchange, the warm hand on the shoulder, the song coming out and the ear holding onto it. — Ada Limon

There remains the mystery of how the pupil devours so much bastard beauty. Abandoned property.

This land and I are rewilding. — Ada Limon

My mother's psychic says, everyone essentially wants
the same thing as everyone else, a sense of belonging, a coming home. — Ada Limon

What I didn't like was how people talked to me
now that I was no longer single; they were nicer.
Men who never looked at me would start up a conversation,
like I was suddenly some safer form of fire. — Ada Limon

There are so many people who've come before us,
arrows and wagon wheels, obsidian tools, buffalo.
Look out at the meadow, you can almost see them,
generations dissolved in the bluegrass and hay.
I want to try and be terrific. Even for an hour. — Ada Limon

I wanted to be a hummingbird.
It made sense to long for rapid wings and the ability to hover always
to be Huitzilopochtli taming my snakes.
Sometimes though, the thought exhausts me and
I want to be a slow horse, a tennis shoe. — Ada Limon

I am not obsessing.
I am just sitting here
perforating this post-it
with a push-pin. — Ada Limon

Desire is a tricky thing, the boiling of the body's wants, — Ada Limon

Think crucial hanging.
Think crayon orange.
There is one low, leaning
heart-shaped globe left
and dearest, can you
tell, I am trying
to love you less. — Ada Limon

Don't think about Laika in orbit. Don't think about cringe and catastrophe. — Ada Limon

...this life is a fist
of fast wishes caught by nothing
but the fishhook of tomorrow's tug. — Ada Limon

Precise, graceful, and generous, the poems in SuperLoop, seem to be born out of a deep, careful attention and a profound compassion. Sometimes the quiet observer, sometimes the kid in the center of the messed-up carnival, these poems are the fireflies you've missed all winter, the longed-for return of the bees. Unaffected and inherently hopeful, Callihan's work is as merciful as it is moving. — Ada Limon

I swear, I'll try harder not to miss as much: the tree, or how your fingers under still sleep-stunned sheets coaxed all my colors back. — Ada Limon

I'm thirty-five and remember all that I've done wrong. — Ada Limon

Here is my sacrifice: my hummingbird landing in a stranger's palm. — Ada Limon

I'm learning so many different ways to be quiet. There's how I stand in the lawn, that's one way. There's also how I stand in the field across from the street, that's another way because I'm farther from people and therefore more likely to be alone. There's how I don't answer the phone, and how I sometimes like to lie down on the floor in the kitchen and pretend I'm not home when people knock. There's daytime silent where I stare, and a nighttime silent when I do things. There's shower silent and bath silent and California silent and Kentucky silent and car silent and then there's the silence that comes back, a million times bigger than me, sneaks into my bones and wails and wails and wails until I can't be quiet anymore. That's how this machine works. — Ada Limon

Maybe my limbs are made
mostly for decoration,
like the way I feel about
persimmons. — Ada Limon

Here it is: the new way of living with the world inside of us so we cannot lose it, and we cannot be lost. You and me are us and then, and it and sky. — Ada Limon

Months later, when we went on our first date, I tried to seem put together, I wore a shawl she had given me. And her ring. I thought everything was behind me: death, and dying, and sickness. I didn't know I was changing my life - that I would have done anything, that what was left of me would become so ruthless to survive. — Ada Limon

But what I forgot was that it was our plan, not hers, not the one doing the dying, this was a plan for those who still had a next. See, our job was simple: keep on living. Her job was harder, the hardest. — Ada Limon

All night I dreamt of bonfires and burn piles
and ghosts of men, and spirits
behind those birds of flame.
I cannot tell anymore when a door opens or closes,
I can only hear the frame saying, Walk through. — Ada Limon

I mean, it's hard to talk about death without realizing that's our end too, right? I am constantly aware of death. It's not that I want to be, but it's a fascination of the mind and it plays a role in why I want to live my life a certain way. The more I am aware of my mortality the better person I am and the better I am at choosing a life that is aware of its beauty. — Ada Limon

HOW TO TRIUMPH LIKE A GIRL I like the lady horses best, how they make it all look easy, like running 40 miles per hour is as fun as taking a nap, or grass. I like their lady horse swagger, after winning. Ears up, girls, ears up! But mainly, let's be honest, I like that they're ladies. As if this big dangerous animal is also a part of me, that somewhere inside the delicate skin of my body, there pumps an 8-pound female horse heart, giant with power, heavy with blood. Don't you want to believe it? Don't you want to lift my shirt and see the huge beating genius machine that thinks, no, it knows, it's going to come in first. — Ada Limon

Not so much living, but a hovering without sense. — Ada Limon

If we could light up the room with pain,
we'd be such a glorious fire. — Ada Limon

Bellow

"Tell the range and all that's howling,
the flickers of life beyond the weeds,
the vulture's furrowed brow of flight,
the blasted sticky Canadian lawn thistle;
tell the clowned-out clouds and the rain,
and all that makes you go quiet again,
tell them that you didn't come here
to make a fuss, or break, or growl, or
scream; tell them-crazy sky and stars
between-tell them you didn't come
to disturb the night air and throw a fit,
then get down in the dark and do it. — Ada Limon

No one wants to be remembered for their death, or rather, I don't. So why do I remember hers and remember hers? I — Ada Limon

People have done this before, but not us. — Ada Limon