22 Quotes by Ross Gay

The more stuff you love the happier you will be.

...which is simply called sharing what we love, what we find beautiful, which is an ethics.

Is sorrow the true wild?And if it is—and if we join them—your wild to mine—what’s that?For joining, too, is a kind of annihilation. What if we joined our sorrows, I’m saying. I’m saying: What if that is joy?

So today I’m recalling the utility, the need, of my own essayettes to emerge from such dailiness, and in that way to be a practice of witnessing one’s delight, of being in and with one’s delight, daily, which actually requires vigilance. It also requires faith that delight will be with you daily, that you needn’t hoard it. No scarcity of delight.

A good little bookstore…is a laboratory for our coming together.

Of course she’s dead: Tina was her name, of leukemia: so I heard—why else would I try sadly to make music of her unremarkable kindness?I am trying, I think, to forgive myselffor something I don’t know what.But what I do know is that I love the moment when the poet saysI am trying to do thisor I am trying to do that.

I have no children of my own, but I love a lot of kids and love a lot of people with kids, who, it seems to me, are in constant communion with terror, and that terror exists immediately beside . . . let’s here call it delight—different from pleasure, connected to joy, Zadie Smith’s joy, somehow—terror and delight sitting next to each other, their feet dangling off the side of a bridge very high up.

Don peered at me again with those sad eyes,or through me, or into me,the way my dead do sometimes,looking straight into their homes,which hopefully have flowersin a vase on a big wooden table,and a comfortable chair or two,and huge windows through which lightpours to wash clean and make a touch less awfulwhat forever otherwise will hurt.

I swore when I got into this poem I would convertthis sorrow into some kind of honey with the little musicsI can sometimes make with these scribbled artifactsof our desolation.