Szybist Mary Quotes

#1. You can't have two worlds in your hands
and choose emptiness. #Quote by Mary Szybist

#2. The Troubadours Etc."

Just for this evening, let's not mock them.
Not their curtsies or cross-garters
or ever-recurring pepper trees in their gardens
promising, promising.

At least they had ideas about love.

All day we've driven past cornfields, past cows poking their heads
through metal contraptions to eat.
We've followed West 84, and what else?
Irrigation sprinklers fly past us, huge wooden spools in the fields,
lounging sheep, telephone wires,
yellowing flowering shrubs.

Before us, above us, the clouds swell, layers of them,
the violet underneath of clouds.
Every idea I have is nostalgia. Look up:
there is the sky that passenger pigeons darkened and filled -
darkened for days, eclipsing sun, eclipsing all other sound
with the thunder of their wings.
After a while, it must have seemed that they followed
not instinct or pattern but only
one another.

When they stopped, Audubon observed,
they broke the limbs of stout trees by the weight of the numbers.

And when we stop we'll follow - what?
Our hearts?

The Puritans thought that we are granted the ability to love
only through miracle,
but the troubadours knew how to burn themselves through,
how to make themselves shrines to their own longing.
The spectacular was never behind them.

Think of days of those scarlet-breasted, blue-winged #Quote by Mary Szybist

#3. Apology

I didn't mean to say so much to you.
I should have thought to let the evening end
by looking at the stars subdued

into their antique blue and alabaster hues.
Such looking would have fit with my intent.
I didn't mean to speak that way to you.

If I could take it back, I'd take it, undo
it, and replace it with the things I meant
to give - not what I let slip (it's true)

like any pristine star of ornamental hue.
I do not always do what I intend.
I didn't mean to say so much to you.

It slipped before I saw, before I knew.
Or do we always do what we intend?
Perhaps it's true and all along I knew

what I was saying - but how I wanted you.
I should have thought to let the evening end.
The placid stars seemed filled and then subdued
by what I did and did not want to do. #Quote by Mary Szybist

#4. Without you my air tastes like nothing. For you I hold my breath. #Quote by Mary Szybist

#5. 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. #Quote by Mary Szybist

#6. Form is endlessly interesting to me, and I love poetry as a formal enterprise. #Quote by Mary Szybist

#7. In Tennessee I Found a Firefly"

Flashing in the grass; the mouth of a spider clung
to the dark of it: the legs of the spider
held the tucked wings close,
held the abdomen still in the midst of calling
with thrusts of phosphorescent light -

When I am tired of being human, I try to remember
the two stuck together like burrs. I try to place them
central in my mind where everything else must
surround them, must see the burr and the barb of them.
There is courtship, and there is hunger. I suppose
there are grips from which even angels cannot fly.
Even imagined ones. Luciferin, luciferase.
When I am tired of only touching,
I have my mouth to try to tell you
what, in your arms, is not erased. #Quote by Mary Szybist

#8. Via Negativa

Sometimes it's too hard with words or dark or silence.
Tonight I want a prayer of high-rouged cheekbones
and light: a litany of back-lit figures,
lithe and slim, draped in fabrics soft and wrinkleless and pale
as onion slivers. Figures that won't stumble or cough:
sleek kid-gloved Astaires who'll lift
ladies with glamorous sweeps in their hair -
They'll bubble and glitter like champagne.
They'll whisper and lean and waltz and wink effortlessly
as figurines twirling in music boxes, as skaters in their dreams.

And the prayer will not be crowded.
You'll hear each click of staccato heel
echo through the glassy ballrooms - too few shimmering skirts;
the prayer will seem to ache
for more. But the prayer will not ache.
When we enter, its chandeliers and skies
will blush with pleasure. Inside
we will be weightless, and our goodness will not matter
in a prayer so light, so empty it will float. #Quote by Mary Szybist

#9. I turn to poems to find spaces that might enlarge, rather than distill, experience. #Quote by Mary Szybist

#10. 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. #Quote by Mary Szybist

#11. Writing poems is a chance to construct spaces that I want to imaginatively inhabit. #Quote by Mary Szybist

#12. Mary tells herself that if only she could have a child she could carry around like an extra lung, the emptiness inside her would stop gnawing. #Quote by Mary Szybist

#13. 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? #Quote by Mary Szybist

#14. But remember, child, we may all have our own story and destiny, and sometimes our seemingly bad fortune, but we're all part of a greater story too. One that transcends the soil, the wind, time ... even our own tears. Greater stories will have their way. #Quote by Mary E. Pearson

#15. My parents, Mary Agnes Smith and Rowland Smith, both had to work since their early teens, she in the holiday boarding house of her mother and he in his father's market garden in Marton Moss, a village on the south side of Blackpool, just north of Saint Anne's-on-Sea. #Quote by Michael Smith

#16. Entertainment for entertainment's sake is the most expensive form of death ... #Quote by Pearl Mary Teresa Craigie

#17. I have a child and I don't want to be at work all the time when he's small. I want to spend time with him. #Quote by Mary-Louise Parker

#18. Mary Hudson waved to me. I waved back. I couldn't have stopped myself, even if Id wanted to. Her stickwork aside, she happened to be a girl who knew how to wave to somebody from third base. #Quote by J.D. Salinger

#19. There's definitely a magical quality to writing that can't be explained. I can write something I love in two days, or I can work on a story every day for months and it never comes together. #Quote by Mary J. Miller

#20. Lucy rubbed her back, a feeling of panic tightening her chest. She was the last person to give love advice. She hadn't done anything but pine for Jem since he'd gone, and done nothing but pine for him since he'd returned. She hadn't taken her love for him and put it anywhere at all.
Alda looked up, eyes red. "I need to take that love and spread it around. What a waste to just keep it tucked inside. #Quote by Mary Jane Hathaway

#21. I was a liberal arts junkie and I figured, well, I'll go work for somebody somewhere. All I knew was that I was going to have to come home and figure it out. #Quote by Mary Chapin Carpenter

#22. And with the deftness of a thief, he was picking the lock of her willpower. #Quote by Mary Jo Putney

#23. Mormons ... are so strong, they can handle wealth, they are confident. I think it is because they are not bogged down by rules for equality, but have a firmly defined system of relative status and responsible command. #Quote by Mary Douglas

#24. Honey," Bessie's mamma used to say, "politicians and judges and coppers are money-grubbing thieves. They'll screw you, and rob you, and win elections for doing it, but there's no way around them. Smile and pay the sonsabitches off." The #Quote by Mary Doria Russell

#25. People are never so near playing the fool as when they think themselves wise. #Quote by Mary Wortley Montagu

#26. She was held in the tension just before movement, about to walk back toward the house. Later she would think, If I had turned away, I'd have missed the moment he fell in love.
He would not remember it that way. What he experienced was not so much the beginning of love as a cessation of pain. #Quote by Mary Doria Russell

#27. She had challenged him on this point one night at Anne and George's, inhibitions weakened by Ronrico: "Explain this Mass to me!"

There was a silence as he sat still, apparently looking at the dinner plates and chicken bones. "Consider the Star of David," he said quietly. "Two triangles, one pointing down, one pointing up. I find this a powerful image - the Divine reaching down, humanity reaching upward. And in the center, an intersection, where the Divine and human meet. The Mass takes place in that space." His eyes lifted and met hers: a look of lucid candor. "I understand it as a place where the Divine and the human are one. And as a promise, perhaps. That God will reach toward us if we reach toward Him, that we and our most ordinary human acts - like eating bread and drinking wine - can be transformed and made sacred. #Quote by Mary Doria Russell

#28. Some people drift through their entire life. They do it one day at a time, one week at a time, one month at a time. It happens so gradually they are unaware of how their lives are slipping away until it's too late. #Quote by Mary Kay Ash

#29. Young men need to be socialized in such a way that rape is as unthinkable to them as cannibalism. #Quote by Mary Pipher

#30. a dream half-waking, broken and uneasy, of the small gods of small places; gods of hills and woods and streams and crossways; the gods who still haunt their broken shrines, waiting in the dusk beyond the lights of the busy Christian churches, and the dogged rituals of the greater gods of Rome. #Quote by Mary Stewart

#31. When I introduced you to Mary Ann, I wanted to call you my girlfriend, Elli," he looked up at her to see her eyes were wide, "I've never had a girlfriend, so I'm not sure if I'll do the boyfriend/girlfriend thing right, but the thought of you being with someone else, or me with someone else, actually hurts my gut, so I guess what I'm trying to say is," he took a deep breath, this was huge, and he thought he sounded stupid but with the way her eyes were glazing over, maybe he was doing this right. "I was wondering if you wanted to be my girlfriend." She smiled at him lovingly, cupping his face in her hands.
"Are you sure? I'm kinda crazy." He laughed, kissing her palm.
"I'm sure."
"Then, yes, Shea, I would love to be your girlfriend. #Quote by Toni Aleo

#32. Creation's gold mine is in you. The key is deliberate intention. Whatever your dream may be at this moment, identify it. If you cannot define your desire, it can never become a reality. #Quote by Mary Manin Morrissey

#33. But I think that this apparent desire to be a victim cloaks an opposing dread: that Americans are in truth profoundly, neurotically terrified of being victims, ever, in any way. This fear is conceivably one reason we initiated the particularly vicious and gratuitous Iraq war―because Americans can't tolerate feeling like victims, even briefly. I think it is the reason that every boob with a hangnail has been clogging the courts and haunting talk shows across the land for the last twenty years, telling his/her "story" and trying to get redress. Whatever the suffering is, it's not to be endured, for God's sake, not felt and never, ever accepted. It's to be triumphed over. And because some things cannot be triumphed over unless they are first accepted and endured, because, indeed, some things cannot be triumphed over at all, the "story" must be told again and again in endless pursuit of a happy ending. To be human is finally to be a loser, for we are all fated to lose our carefully constructed sense of self, our physical strength, our health, our precious dignity, and finally our lives. A refusal to tolerate this reality is a refusal to tolerate life, and art based on the empowering message and positive image is just such a refusal. #Quote by Mary Gaitskill

#34. I'm always terrified when I'm writing. #Quote by Mary Karr

#35. Oh. Well, as long as it's not my fault. #Quote by Mary Layton

#36. The hard truth is that there are people who believe they're writers and work hard at it and are sincere about it, but they don't make it. You have to be prepared for that possibility. #Quote by Mary Gaitskill

#37. The only joy I had was writing what was. That book was. It no longer amuses me to be all the things I was when I wrote that. But it is my story as I was then. #Quote by Mary MacLane

#38. It takes a good many years and some pretty hard knocks to make people tolerant. #Quote by Mary Roberts Rinehart

#39. In my own work, I usually revise through forty or fifty drafts of a poem before I begin to feel content with it. #Quote by Mary Oliver

#40. The challenge before us is to savor the unknown and delight in the taste of possibility. #Quote by Mary Anne Radmacher

#41. The world is your mirror...love what you see and you love YOU! #Quote by Liz Hester

#42. Her mouth smiled, smiled hard, but her eyes did not smile, ever. Her eyes watched and looked for something they knew they'd never find. #Quote by Mary Gaitskill

#43. I don't know what you hope for in a husband, but if it is to be loved ... well, I think it would be very easy to fall in love with you. #Quote by Mary Jo Putney

#44. When it comes to explaining the Blessed Virgin Mary, having a lot of love is more important than having a lot of answers. When we come up lacking, she'll make greater goods out of our deficiencies, as only a mother can do. Whenever we're humiliated and shown our weakness, we should get ready for something better than we could ever plan and prepare to accomplish. Evangelize with joy, then, and with confidence. Know from the start that you don't have all the answers-but your Savior does, and He loves His mother. He will give you everything you need, even if sometimes you need to fail. #Quote by Scott Hahn

#45. Noble morality! and consistent with the cautious prudence of a little soul that cannot extend its views beyond the present minute division of existence. If all the faculties of woman's mind are only to be cultivated as they respect her dependence on man; if, when she obtains a husband she has arrived at her goal, and meanly proud, is satisfied with such a paltry crown, let her grovel contentedly, scarcely raised by her employments above the animal kingdom; but, if she is struggling for the prize of her high calling, let her cultivate her understanding without stopping to consider what character the husband may have whom she is destined to marry. Let her only determine, without being too anxious about present happiness, to acquire the qualities that ennoble a rational being, and a rough, inelegant husband may shock her taste without destroying her peace of mind. She will not model her soul to suit the frailties of her companion, but to bear with them: his character may be a trial, but not an impediment to virtue. #Quote by Mary Wollstonecraft

#46. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. He was about to engage in some hellaciously naughty fornication. #Quote by Kendall Grey

#47. I know that suffering is one place where He ministers to us the most. So to think that we've had our quota would be foolish. I am just longing for the day when all the pain stops. #Quote by Mary Beth Chapman

#48. The Catholic Church has never really come to terms with women. What I object to is being treated either as Madonnas or Mary Magdalenes. #Quote by Shirley Williams

#49. She looks like a Disney princess, but is a total badass. #Quote by Mary J. Williams

#50. Male religion entombs women in sepulchres of silence in order to chant its own eternal and dreary dirge to a past that never was. #Quote by Mary Daly