Szybist Mary Quotes & Sayings

I think that a good deal of poetry and art gives us some sense of access to another's voice, perception, texture of thought, imagination. Sometimes it gives us better access to the strangeness in ourselves. — Mary Szybist

I turn to poems to find spaces that might enlarge, rather than distill, experience. — Mary Szybist

I do not believe in the beauty of falling. — Mary Szybist

If I could/bind myself to this moment, to the slow//snare of its scent/what would it matter if I became//just the flutter of page/in a text someone turns//to examine me/in the wrong color? — Mary Szybist

I have always been attracted to apostrophe, perhaps because of its resemblance to prayer. A voice reaches out to something beyond itself that cannot answer it. I find that moving in part because it enacts what is true of all address and communication on some level - it cannot fully be heard, understood, or answered. — Mary Szybist

If I can see the future, then what does that mean? It would be like knowing the end of a story right from the start, almost as if you were reading it backwards.
And who wants to know how their own story ends? — Marcus Sedgwick

Christian morality, laws rooted in the secular humanist belief that all consensual sexual acts are morally equal. That belief is anti-biblical and amoral; to codify it into law is to codify a lie. — Pat Buchanan

In the beginning, I tried to be a more cosmopolitan writer, but I realized that I was a country boy, and I had to deal with things I knew about and where I came from. — Ernest Gaines

When I was young, I reached a point where I found myself unable to pray. I was devastated by it. I missed being able to say words in my head that I believed could be heard by a being, a consciousness outside me. That is when I turned to poetry. — Mary Szybist

Writing poems is a chance to construct spaces that I want to imaginatively inhabit. — Mary Szybist

I was thinking recently about the popularity of TV shows about people shopping for houses. I wonder if part of their appeal is the chance to vicariously imagine our lives playing out in a variety of spaces. We have a sense that the shape and style of our dwellings affects the shapes of the lives that unfold within them. — Mary Szybist

I don't want people thinking of me sexually. I don't want people to be like, 'She's hot-looking,' you know? I want them to listen to me for what I am saying. And I think the best way to do that is to sniff my armpits, and like, sit and burp every now and then. It just completely throws people off. I had a couple of offers to do some hot scenes in the shower with some guy and to make it real hot and sexy. The next thing you know, I'd be the next J.Lo or something. But that's easy. I want it the hard way. — Michelle Rodriguez

In recent years, using tissue samples from themselves, their families, and their patients, scientists had grown cells of all kinds - prostate cancer, appendix, foreskin, even bits of human cornea - often with surprising ease. Researchers were using that growing library of cells to make historic discoveries: that cigarettes caused lung cancer; how X-rays and certain chemicals — Rebecca Skloot

There's plenty that poetry cannot do, but the miracle, of course, is how much it can do, how much it does do. — Mary Szybist

A man's weakness is a woman's beauty ... a woman's weakness is falling in love. — Jemina Akhtar

Sometimes I have a hard time distinguishing between faith and hope. — Mary Szybist

A home without a dog is merely a shelter. — Stephen Huneck

Form is endlessly interesting to me, and I love poetry as a formal enterprise. — Mary Szybist

Without you my air tastes like nothing. For you I hold my breath. — Mary Szybist

You can't have two worlds in your hands
and choose emptiness. — Mary Szybist

Days go by when I do nothing but underline the damp edge of myself. — Mary Szybist

You are never lost when you can see the temple. — Gary E. Stevenson

We used to fuck with our Catholic roommate during Lent, trying to determine exactly how specific God's opinion was about that one. What if you ate something that you didn't know contained meat? What if you were driving east at 11:30pm and unknowingly crossed into a new time zone right before biting into a cheeseburger? During an airline flight, did God go by departure time, arrival time, or local time when determining the Hell- or Heavenbound nature of your meals? "What if you're a butcher," I remember saying, "and you're slicing up a side of beef on Friday when a stray bit of flesh becomes airborne and lodges itself in your throat. You begin to choke. You can't cough it up, but you could swallow it and save your life. What then, when your life is at stake?" Ridiculous? Sacrilegious? — Johnny B. Truant