Linda Pastan Quotes & Sayings

Poetry is not a code to be broken but a way of seeing with the eyes shut. — Linda Pastan

I have dreamed of our bed as if it were a shore where we would be washed up, not this striped mattress we must cover with sheets. [from "After an Absence"] — Linda Pastan

Just looking at them I grow greedy, as if they were freshly baked loaves waiting on their shelves to be broken open
that one and that
and I make my choice in a mood of exalted luck, browsing among them like a cow in sweetest pasture. For life is continuous as long as they wait to be read
these inked paths opening into the future, page after page, every book its own receding horizon. And I hold them, one in each hand, a curious ballast weighing me here to earth. — Linda Pastan

To be the other woman
is to be a season
that is always about to end,
when the air is flowered
with jasmine and peach,
and the weather day after day
is flawless,
and the forecast
is hurricane. — Linda Pastan

Evil is simply
a grammatical error:
a failure to leap
the precipice
between "he"
and "I. — Linda Pastan

I'm only leaving you
for a handful of days,
but it feels as though
I'll be gone forever - -
the way the door closes
behind me with such solidity,
the way my suitcase
carries everything
I'd need for an eternity
of traveling light.
I've left my hotel number
on your desk, instructions
about the dog and heating dinner. But
like the weather front
they warn is on its way
with its switchblades
of wind and ice,
our lives have minds
of their own. — Linda Pastan

[But the constricted light,
the year closing down on itself with all
the vacancies of January ahead, leave me
unreconciled even to beauty.]
When will you be coming back? — Linda Pastan

What We Want
What we want
is never simple.
We move among the things
we thought we wanted:
a face, a room, an open book
and these things bear our names
now they want us.
But what we want appears
in dreams, wearing disguises.
We fall past,
holding out our arms
and in the morning
our arms ache.
We don't remember the dream,
but the dream remembers us.
It is there all day
as an animal is there
under the table,
as the stars are there. — Linda Pastan

Spring is the shortest season. — Linda Pastan

I made a list of things I have
to remember and a list
of things I want to forget,
but I see they are the same list. — Linda Pastan

What we want is never simple. — Linda Pastan

I am tired of the litany
of months, September October
I am tired of the way the seasons
keep changing, mimicking
the seasons of the flesh
which are real and finite. — Linda Pastan

Grief is a circular staircase. — Linda Pastan

I regret the way pain has taught me nothing. — Linda Pastan

Because the night you asked me,
the small scar of the quarter moon
had healed - the moon was whole again;
because life seemed so short;
because life stretched out before me
like the halls of a nightmare;
because I knew exactly what I wanted;
because I knew exactly nothing;
because I shed my childhood with my clothes -
they both had years of wear in them;
because your eyes were darker than my father's;
because my father said I could do better;
because I wanted badly to say no;
because Stanly Kowalski shouted "Stella...;"
because you were a door I could slam shut;
because endings are written before beginnings;
because I knew that after twenty years
you'd bring the plants inside for winter
and make a jungle we'd sleep in naked;
because I had free will;
because everything is ordained;
I said yes. — Linda Pastan