91 Quotes by Natasha Trethewey

The act of making poetry is an act of hope.

My own journey in becoming a poet began with memory – with the need to record and hold on to what was being lost. One of my earliest poems, Give and Take, was about my Aunt Sugar, how I was losing her to her memory loss.

A man’s pursuit of knowledge is greater than his shortcomings, the limits of his vision.

The experience of poetry could bring my mother back to me. Poetry offers a different kind of solace – here on earth.

I don’t like a kind of workshop that is about editing – I don’t want to sit there and be an editor. I don’t want to tell someone how to “fix” a poem.

What’s left is palimpsest – one memory bleeding into another, overwriting it.

I read the line over and over as if I might discern the little fires set the flames of an idea licking the page how knowledge burns.

Of course, we’re made up of what we’ve forgotten too, what we’ve tried to bury or suppress.

Of course, we’re made up of what we’ve forgotten too, what we’ve tried to bury or suppress. Some forgetting is necessary and the mind works to shield us from things that are too painful; even so, some aspect of trauma lives on in the body, from which it can reemerge unexpectedly.