Terrance Hayes Quotes & Sayings

It might be the white woman or man our son or daughter will marry and the white woman or man our grandson or granddaughter will marry, all of them wading into the future until one of our line claims to be Sicilian. Leave instructions: the granddaughter of our granddaughter shall be named Cicily. — Terrance Hayes

Ask a glass of water why it pities
the rain. Ask the lunatic yard dog why it tolerates the leash. — Terrance Hayes

One of Still Lifes many achievements is its paradoxical mix of intensity and stillness. Alexander Longs visions of landscape, identity and "History itself, a joke that no one gets" are simultaneously meditative and alert, restless and focused. This is a smart, compassionate poet. Still Life is a mesmerizing new book. — Terrance Hayes

If you and every person in the county mailed
me an envelope of five to ten dollars, I think
I could rehabilitate the sheep. — Terrance Hayes

I believe everything is a metaphor for sex. — Terrance Hayes

I'm chasing a kind of language that can be unburdened by people's expectations. I think music is the primary model-how close can you get this language to be like music and communicate feeling at the base level in the same way a composition with no words communicates meaning? It might be impossible. Language is always burdened by thought. I'm just trying to get it so it can be like feeling. — Terrance Hayes

This is what it means to believe in ascension and fear climbing. — Terrance Hayes

Patricia Smith is one of the best poets around and has been for a long time. Her Blood Dazzler is full of capacious soul and formal inventiveness: the compassion and artfulness necessary to capture the tragedies and Tragedy of Katrina. Smith is herself a storm of beautiful, frightening talent. Her words will wash you or wash you away. I consider this new book a major literary event. — Terrance Hayes

My mother was a dark red head wrap. Her life had been heavier than the fire she carried on her back. This is the meaning of the past, Boy. There were maps & scriptures carved into my palms, whole towns — Terrance Hayes

Look, the world is everywhere: satellites, end tables, the pink and white poinsettias outside the church; reunions and degrees. All those radiant asterisks ... Soon it will all make sense. — Terrance Hayes

I'll eat you to live: that's poetry. — Terrance Hayes

In HEATHEN, R. Flowers Rivera remixes the classical and the Biblical, the usual and the typical until what we thought we knew of ourselves and others is new again. The mythic becomes particular; the particular becomes mythic in these fascinating poems of personalities and personas. Rivera's work is rich in empathy and invention. Heathen is a book of psalms for the present day. — Terrance Hayes

I am carrying the whimper
you can hear when the mouth is collapsed, the wisdom
of monkeys. Ask a glass of water why it pities
the rain. Ask the lunatic yard dog why it tolerates the leash.
Brothers and sisters, when you spend your nights
out on a limb, there's a chance you'll fall in your sleep. — Terrance Hayes

I wish I could weep the way my teacher did as he read us Molly Bloom's soliloquy of yes. — Terrance Hayes

Trouble is one of the ways we discover the complexities Of the soul. — Terrance Hayes

Can you remember the womb? How, in the moments before birth, The lines were washed from the map That told the route you'd come? — Terrance Hayes