53 Quotes by Ada Limon

I want to give you something, or I want to take something from you. But I want to feel the exchange, the warm hand on the shoulder, the song coming out and the ear holding onto it.

Don’t think about Laika in orbit. Don’t think about cringe and catastrophe.

But what I forgot was that it was our plan, not hers, not the one doing the dying, this was a plan for those who still had a next. See, our job was simple: keep on living. Her job was harder, the hardest.

Months later, when we went on our first date, I tried to seem put together, I wore a shawl she had given me. And her ring. I thought everything was behind me: death, and dying, and sickness. I didn’t know I was changing my life – that I would have done anything, that what was left of me would become so ruthless to survive.

I’m thirty-five and remember all that I’ve done wrong.

Look, we are not unspectacular things. We’ve come this far, survived this much. What would happen if we decided to survive more? To love harder?

How good it is to love live things, even when what they’ve done is terrible, how much we each want to be the pure exonerated creature, to be turned loose into our own wide open without a single harness of sin to stop us.

Caring for each other is a form of radical survival that we don’t always take into account.