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Ada Limon

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Famous Ada Limon Quotes

“When she was dying, it was impossible to see forward to the next minute. What was happening — for whole weeks — was all that was happening and happening and happening. Months before that, I got the dumb soup wrong. How awful. It was all she wanted and I had gotten it wrong. Then, in the airless days when it was really happening, we started to power panic that we didn’t know enough. What should we do with your ashes? Water or dirt. Water or dirt. Once, she asked to just be thrown into the river where we used to go, still alive, but not living anymore. After it was done, I couldn’t go back to my life. You understand, right? It wasn’t the same. I couldn’t tell if I loved myself more or less. It wasn’t until later, when I moved in with him and stood outside on our patchy imperfect lawn, that I remembered what had been circling in me: I am beautiful. I am full of love. I am dying.”

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Author:Ada Limon
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“Six horses died in a tractor-trailer fire. There. That's the hard part. I wanted to tell you straight away so we could grieve together. So many sad things, that's just one on a long recent list that loops and elongates in the chest, in the diaphragm, in the alveoli. What is it they say, heartsick or downhearted? I picture a heart lying down on the floor of the torso, pulling up the blankets over its head, thinking the pain will go on forever (even though it won't). The heart is watching Lifetime movies and wishing, and missing all the good parts of her that she has forgotten. The heart is so tired of beating herself up, she wants to stop it still, but also she wants the blood to return, wants to bring in the thrill and wind of the ride, the fast pull of life driving underneath her. What the heart wants? The heart wants her horses back.”

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“But somehow, I’ve stopped praising you. How the valley when you first see it—the small roads back to your youth—is so painfully pretty at first, then, after a month of black coffee, it’s just another place your bullish brain exists, bothered by itself and how hurtful human life can be. Isn’t that how it is? You wake up some days full of crow and shine, and then someone has put engine coolant in the medicine on another continent and not even crying helps cure the idea of purposeful poison.”

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Book:Bright Dead Things
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“Humans are so strange in the ways that we are either recovering too quickly from something or holding on to pain forever. There seems to be no middle ground. We bounce back or we wallow. But remembering the hardest moments of grief or loss and letting them be present for you in the good moments is something I’ve found useful and grounding as I age. It feels like a way of remembering that balance does exist. This too. This grief. This joy. Together always intertwined.”

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Author:Ada Limon
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“I remember the first year after my stepmother’s death. I saw her in everything. It wasn’t on purpose. I wasn’t looking for her, she just showed up. Unexpected and alive and also not alive in my life. I remember walking in Brooklyn and there was a woman who looked just like her… ducking into the Blue Stove bakery and I thought very simply, “Of course. She loves good food.” And then of course, I knew it wasn’t her, it was only the back of someone’s head really. And then it turned out to be a woman who did not look like her at all. That’s how it happens, right? All of you who have lost someone, you know it, you’ve seen it. The visitation seems like a gift and also a hard memory of grief.”

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