Dorothea Lasky Quotes

• “I reached deep in you and pulled out a cardinal which in bright red flew out the window.”

  Dorothea Lasky

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• “When people talk about poetry as a project, they suggest that the road through a poem is a single line. When really the road through a poem is a series of lines, like a constellation, all interconnected. Poems take place in the realm of chance, where the self and the universal combine, where life exist. I can’t suggest to you that going through a line that is more like a constellation than a road is easy—or that the blurring of the self and the universal doesn’t shred a poet a little bit in the process. The terrain of a poem is unmapped (including the shapes of the trees along the constellation-road). A great poet knows never to expect sun or rain or cold or wind in the process of creating a poem. In a great poem all can come to the fore at once. It would be worse yet, if none are there at all.”

  Dorothea Lasky

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• “And forgot about me
  You forgot about me
  
  And what I meant to you
  And then it was over”

  Dorothea Lasky

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• “A monster
  Someone who left me in the dark
  Someone who darkened me
  A million times over”

  Dorothea Lasky

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• “In every scene I am waiting for you
  To be with me in dreams”

  Dorothea Lasky

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• “To get rejected so vehemently
  Over and over again
  Until some said it was the rejection I was after
  No it wasn't
  I wanted the intensity that you sometimes promised”

  Dorothea Lasky

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• “What's worse
  To never have them
  To have them only in part
  What's worse
  To be endlessly waiting
  To be endlessly waiting
  What's worse—nothing or nothing
  What's worse”

  Dorothea Lasky

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• “There are things you want to say but don't
  There are things I want to say but I already said them
  A year ago or two or five, when we first met
  There were times I thought you knew I loved you
  You never knew
  We never were
  I died
  You died
  That's it”

  Dorothea Lasky

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• “You will realize you love me
  But it will be too late
  
  You will cry out for me
  I will be long gone
  
  This is not a wish
  But what I knew to be so”

  Dorothea Lasky

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• “Not sure what of this you did offer me
  Never did amount to anything
  So with this
  I go”

  Dorothea Lasky

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• “I watch porn
  Cause I'll never be in love”

  Dorothea Lasky

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• “It is as if I had made you believe
  In me once again
  It is as if you knew I was your true love
  It was as if I didn't have to know
  
  In this life
  All you were to me
  Was that flower”

  Dorothea Lasky

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• “I want you to kiss me hard hard
  In the nighttime
  And not give up
  I don’t want to be a thing
  I want to be becoming”

  Dorothea Lasky

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• “You were
  Something or someone I loved
  But I am a traveler
  And I love no one
  But the empty road”

  Dorothea Lasky

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• “You know, I loved you
  I loved you
  I was wrong”

  Dorothea Lasky

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• “I wrapped myself in leaden sheets
  And sank deep into my own infernal ocean”

  Dorothea Lasky

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• “And I go looking looking for you in the streets
  And I never find you
  I never find you at all”

  Dorothea Lasky

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• “I never noticed anything but you
  But you but you
  So that I couldn't sleep”

  Dorothea Lasky

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• “It is the irrational That is worth living for”

  Dorothea Lasky

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• “The Process of Explication"
  
  I
  
  Students, look at this table
  And now when you see a man six feet tall
  You can call him a fathom.
  
  Likewise, students when yes and you do that and other stuff
  Likewise too the shoe falls upon the sun
  And the alphabet is full of blood
  And when you knock upon a sentence in the
  Process of explication you are going to need a lot of rags
  
  Likewise, hello and goodbye.
  
  
  II
  
  Nick Algiers is my student
  And he sits there in a heap in front of me thinking of suicide
  And so, I am the one in front of him
  And I dance around him in a circle and light him on fire
  And with his face on fire, I am suddenly ashamed.
  
  Likewise the distance between us then
  Is the knife that is not marriage.
  
  
  III
  
  Students, I can’t lie, I’d rather be doing something else, I guess
  Like making love or writing a poem
  Or drinking wine on a tropical island
  With a handsome boy who wants to hold me all night.
  
  I can’t lie that dreams are ridiculous.
  And in dreaming myself upon the moon
  I have made the moon my home and no one
  Can ever get to me to hit me or kiss my lips.
  
  And as my bridegroom comes and takes me away from you
  You all ask me what is wrong and I say it is
  That I will never win.”

  Dorothea Lasky

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• “There were things I wished I'd said
  And done
  But it is too late now
  So I go
  Heavy with my offering
  This book, this book”

  Dorothea Lasky

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• “There have been times love has made my human Instincts into animal ones. Once in a dark lit bar, my love said my poems were shit And I, in the light of the candles, Pushed a sword into myself and fell over a cliff Into a neverending ocean. Once a man 5 years my younger Loved me and then gave me up. I raged around him like a bear. I once cheated on a new boyfriend with an old boyfriend. I cheated on an old boyfriend with a new one. Love has the ability to make the world kind, The specifics of one man always blends into another And turns back into my mother’s kisses on my cheek. It is I who loves, but it is in turn The world that loves me back. The world loves And I love back, the specifics of it Once in tune. Once we kissed and I was Mesmerized by the blondness of his cheek With the light on it and the sweet smell of the earth. But still the light on the cheek is the desert lizards Who will eat us in the afterworld and in the light of the moon Ther is the exhaust of love falling over everything”

  Dorothea Lasky

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• “And I am so alone
  And I am alone here
  With the idea of ghosts
  And the idea of humanity, which is a cruel idea”

  Dorothea Lasky

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• “Why? Because a demon is after me
  And he she it has been
  Since the day I was born”

  Dorothea Lasky

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• “I never knew what feeling was
  I only felt the pain”

  Dorothea Lasky

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