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Ada Limon

Ada Limon Quotes

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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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“I sometimes tell my students to do a writing exercise that’s just something on their desk. An object they’ve had with them for a while, a photograph, a stone from the ocean, a shell. I tell them just to explore it, interrogate it, just turn it over in your head and see what might happen. And the most amazing thing happens: they really find they love those objects, and can write about them for a long time. That they carried that black stone home from a day with their father just weeks before he died, that the small elephant was a gift from a friend on a day of heartbreak. We start talking about those objects and soon it feels like our whole life is full of small stories to be grateful for. So many small things we pass all the time without holding them up to the light.”

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Author:Ada Limon
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