Andrea Gibson Quotes

You keep worrying you're taking up too much space. I wish you'd let yourself be the milky way.

Some people will never understand the kind of superpower it takes for some people to just walk outside.

There are few weapons more dangerous than our wounds, and, being wounded, there are things we all do that we would often rather die than face. But no one heals what they refuse to look at. So when asked if I think you’re a good person, I say, I don’t believe in good people. I believe in people who are committed to knowing their own wounds intimately.

I'm never gonna wait that extra twenty minutes to text you back and I'm never gonna play hard to get. I know your life has been hard enough already.

Have you ever had the feeling you owe somebody somewhere

a really good reason to live?

To grow old?

To be ninety-eight-and-a-half

with a laugh like broken glass

so whenever folks walk barefoot

they’ll get hidden pieces embedded in their souls?

Have you ever had the feeling you owe somebody somewhere

a really good reason to live?

To grow old?

To be ninety-eight-and-a-half

with a laugh like broken glass

so whenever folks walk barefoot

they’ll get hidden pieces embedded in their souls?

Like Pac-Man, she swallows my ghosts.

I am so grateful for having a mind that can be changed.

And I am wrong more often than I am writing. And even then, I am often wrong.

A doctor once told me I feel too much. I said, so does god. that’s why you can see the grand canyon from the moon.

For Jenn

At 12 years old I started bleeding with the moon
and beating up boys who dreamed of becoming astronauts.
I fought with my knuckles white as stars,
and left bruises the shape of Salem.
There are things we know by heart,
and things we don't.

At 13 my friend Jen tried to teach me how to blow rings of smoke.
I'd watch the nicotine rising from her lips like halos,
but I could never make dying beautiful.
The sky didn't fill with colors the night I convinced myself
veins are kite strings you can only cut free.
I suppose I love this life,

in spite of my clenched fist.

I open my palm and my lifelines look like branches from an Aspen tree,
and there are songbirds perched on the tips of my fingers,
and I wonder if Beethoven held his breath
the first time his fingers touched the keys
the same way a soldier holds his breath
the first time his finger clicks the trigger.
We all have different reasons for forgetting to breathe.

But my lungs remember
the day my mother took my hand and placed it on her belly
and told me the symphony beneath was my baby sister's heartbeat.
And I knew life would tremble
like the first tear on a prison guard's hardened cheek,
like a prayer on a dying man's lips,
like a vet holding a full bottle of whisky like an empty gun in a war zone…
just take me just take me

Sometimes the scales themselves weigh far too much,
the heaviness of forever balancing blue sky with red blood.
We were all born on days when too many people died in terrible ways,
but you still have to call it a birthday.
You still have to fall for the prettiest girl on the playground at recess
and hope she knows you can hit a baseball
further than any boy in the whole third grade

and I've been running for home
through the windpipe of a man who sings
while his hands playing washboard with a spoon
on a street corner in New Orleans
where every boarded up window is still painted with the words
We're Coming Back
like a promise to the ocean
that we will always keep moving towards the

That I commit to a life of opening and learning, that I commit to learning at a speed that is vigilant and awake, that I commit to knowing where my empathies lean and why they lean there, that I become increasingly familiar with the why of what raises my voice, that I become increasingly familiar with the why of what lulls me to silence, that I be haunted by the ghosts of who my silences have harmed, that I acknowledge that haunting is love, that I trust love lives in whatever points at the dark, that I acknowledge that shame would likely be my laziest gesture, that I stop denying I am a whole person, and my wholeness is often unlovable, and my wholeness is often lovable, that I own the possibility that there isn't a thing one could say about the person I am that I could wholeheartedly deny; All of it-yes, all of the ugly - yes, all of the beauty-, yes, I have failed and will continue to fail,

I have loved and will continue to love, I am committed to leaning and opening, I want people around me who are committed to learning and opening, people who are failing and loving, people who are stalking their own vigilance, the speed of their own compassion saying, 'FASTER FASTER FASTER.

It is incredible what kind of mess I can make
with a nine-hour drive and an unanswered text.

I know this world is far from perfect.
I am not the type to mistake a streetlight for the moon.
I know our wounds are deep as the Atlantic.
But every ocean has a shoreline
and every shoreline has a tide
that is constantly returning
to wake the songbirds in our hands,
to wake the music in our bones,
to place one fearless kiss on the mouth of that new born river
that has to run through the center of our hearts
to find its way home.

Everyone's chest
is a living room wall
with awkwardly placed photographs
hiding fist-sized holes

If we never deny
the inevitable end
of the story,
we will write it
more beautiful
while we're alive.