157 Quotes by Sarah Kay

Sure, I know where most things are but give me enough time and I can lose anything.

Things that I have a hard time being able to fully grasp, sometimes writing the poem helps me work through it. Or I get to the end of the poem and I still haven’t figured anything out, but at least I have a new poem out of it.

Some nights, I wake up knowing he is anxious. He is across the world in another woman’s arms and the years have spread us like dandelion seeds, sanding down the edges of our jigsaw parts that used to only fit each other.

We build model ships in bottles, whispering life into the toothpicks and wire; we make plans and blueprints for the one we hope is coming. And come they do. Fleets of vessels. Battleships and barges. They arrive on the horizon, flags to the sky.

You are not made of metaphors, Not apologies, not excuses.

I love hands like I love people. They are the maps and compasses with which we navigate our way through life, feeling our way over mountains passed and valleys crossed; they are our histories.

And somewhere in between then and now irony slipped its way into my vocabulary. Laughter became the antidote for guilt. Sacrifice grew to be a Band-Aid for shame.

Practice does not make perfect. Practice makes permanent. Repeat the same mistakes over and over, and you don’t get any closer to Carnegie Hall.

Poetry is like a puzzle-solving strategy for me. I like to poem my way through tricky questions and ideas. That’s about the only consistent thread through my poem-creation process.