Brenda Shaughnessy Quotes & Sayings

You are not broken. You break again
and again because

that's what breaking means.
To be whole. — Brenda Shaughnessy

I came to see that what constitutes strength is not just a muscle or will. It can also include the most desperate vulnerability, the saddest heartache, the lightest, sweetest laughter. — Brenda Shaughnessy

It seems unlikely that so much literature
could be made from twenty-six letters.
Doesn't it seem it could all be boiled
down to one sentence? — Brenda Shaughnessy

All gifts are riddles, all lives/are in the middle of mother-lives. — Brenda Shaughnessy

Strength means honoring your entire range of emotion, even your despair and heartbreak. — Brenda Shaughnessy

What if all possible
pain was only the grief of truth? — Brenda Shaughnessy

Where can we
go if not to each other,
resenting every step? — Brenda Shaughnessy

Secret, smug believers! God never gives you
more than you can bear, they like to say, as if
the strong should be punished for their strength:
We can bear it. So we got it.
But what about my baby? How weak does
a newborn have to be to escape God's burdens? — Brenda Shaughnessy

If the two meanings of 'heart' are 'center' and 'part,' then the word 'art' also forms a perplexing doubleness: it is something human-made with materials; that is, it is made of us. Art is life. And yet it is distinct from 'life.' Art is life's counterpoint. We make it, and in that making, art is pointedly not life. It is just made of us. — Brenda Shaughnessy

How anyone becomes herself/is a mystery. — Brenda Shaughnessy

Death and life are, for most of us, too complex to comprehend, but Alex Lemon can pretty casually, accurately, and marvelously correlate them to heavy metal and birthday cake. — Brenda Shaughnessy

Would I dance with you? Both forever and rather die. / It would be like dying, yes. Yes I would. — Brenda Shaughnessy

Strength means ... acknowledging each of those feelings, your questions and ideas and faith and terror, and meeting what comes with the full force of your heart. — Brenda Shaughnessy

I do see the poet as someone whose role it is to push back against anti-intellectualism, anti-activism, and passivity in general. The purpose of this pushing back is to show that there are always infinite sides to a story, amazing unimagined perspectives on any narrative, and no limit to how weird and wild and unexpected our language and its meanings can get. — Brenda Shaughnessy

I've been melted into something
too easy to spill. I make more
and more of myself in order
to make more and more of the baby.
He takes it, this making. And somehow
he's made more of me, too. — Brenda Shaughnessy