Andrea Gibson Quotes

Lately I’ve been thinking about who I want to love, and how I want to love, and why I want to love the way I want to love, and what I need to learn to love that way, and who I need to become to become the kind of love I want to be…and when I break it all down, when I whittle it into a single breath, it essentially comes out like this: Before I die, I want to be somebody’s favorite hiding place, the place they can put everything they know they need to survive, every secret, every solitude, every nervous prayer, and be absolutely certain I will keep it safe. I will keep it safe.

I started talking to the stars in the sky instead. I said, “Tell me about the big bang.” The stars said, “It hurts to become.

One day you will know why I read the poetry of your grief to those waiting to be born, and they are all the more excited

What if I don't want the monster
to stop being a monster?

What if that's the only anchor I have left?
What if my sanity depends on being able to point
at a bad thing and say, That is the bad thing.

Haven't I already lost enough time
losing track of who the enemy is?
I've spent half of my life not knowing the difference

between killing myself and fighting back.

It's turning the thunder into grace,
knowing sometimes the break in your heart
is like the hole in the flute.

Sometimes it's the place
where the music comes through.

She's heard stories of Vietnam vets
who can still feel the tingling of their amputated limbs.
She's wondering how many women are walking around this world
feeling the tingling of their amputated wings,
remembering what it was to fly, to sing.

I keep waiting to get high on life. I keep waiting to wake up in a field remembering I spent the whole night snorting the lines the planes left in the sky, my bloodstream full of honeymoons.

We were all born on days when too many people died in terrible ways, but you still have to call it a birthday.

I explain my gender by saying I am happiest on the road when I'm not here or there, but in between, that yellow line coming down the center of it all like a goddamn sunbeam.

I wish for a heart you can see straight through, for a voice that glows in the dark, and a few really good friends to say, “That’s the way to go.

cause tonight Saturn is on his knees

proposing with all of his ten thousand rings

that whatever song we’ve been singing we sing even more.

I will refuse to call it heaven
if the people I love
(who put me through hell)

aren't there.

Do you know they found land mines in woman's souls.

She's heard stories of Vietnam vets
who can still feel the tingling of their amputated limbs.
She's wondering how many women are walking around this world
feeling the tingling of their amputated wings,
remembering what it was like to fly, to sing.

What I know about living is that the pain is never just ours. Every time I hurt I know the wound is an echo, so I keep listening for the moment the grief becomes a window, when I can see what I couldn't see before.