Ada Limon Quotes

Not so much living, but a hovering without sense. ~ Ada Limon

I'm learning so many different ways to be quiet. There's how I stand in the lawn, that's one way. There's also how I stand in the field across from the street, that's another way because I'm farther from people and therefore more likely to be alone. There's how I don't answer the phone, and how I sometimes like to lie down on the floor in the kitchen and pretend I'm not home when people knock. There's daytime silent where I stare, and a nighttime silent when I do things. There's shower silent and bath silent and California silent and Kentucky silent and car silent and then there's the silence that comes back, a million times bigger than me, sneaks into my bones and wails and wails and wails until I can't be quiet anymore. That's how this machine works. ~ Ada Limon

Here it is: the new way of living with the world inside of us so we cannot lose it, and we cannot be lost. You and me are us and then, and it and sky. ~ Ada Limon

I am not obsessing.
I am just sitting here
perforating this post-it
with a push-pin. ~ Ada Limon

Don't think about Laika in orbit. Don't think about cringe and catastrophe. ~ Ada Limon

No one wants to be remembered for their death, or rather, I don't. So why do I remember hers and remember hers? I ~ Ada Limon

Sometimes, you just want
something so bad you have to lie about it,
so you can hold it in your mouth for a minute,
how real hunger has a real taste. ~ Ada Limon

I'm the hidden bug in the tall weeds,
lighting fires no one can see. ~ Ada Limon

I mean, it's hard to talk about death without realizing that's our end too, right? I am constantly aware of death. It's not that I want to be, but it's a fascination of the mind and it plays a role in why I want to live my life a certain way. The more I am aware of my mortality the better person I am and the better I am at choosing a life that is aware of its beauty. ~ Ada Limon

When she was dying, it was impossible to see forward to the next minute. What was happening - for whole weeks - was all that was happening and happening and happening. Months before that, I got the dumb soup wrong. How awful. It was all she wanted and I had gotten it wrong. Then, in the airless days when it was really happening, we started to power panic that we didn't know enough. What should we do with your ashes? Water or dirt. Water or dirt. Once, she asked to just be thrown into the river where we used to go, still alive, but not living anymore. After it was done, I couldn't go back to my life. You understand, right? It wasn't the same. I couldn't tell if I loved myself more or less. It wasn't until later, when I moved in with him and stood outside on our patchy imperfect lawn, that I remembered what had been circling in me: I am beautiful. I am full of love. I am dying. ~ Ada Limon

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. ~ Ada Limon

What if, instead of carrying

a child, I am supposed to carry grief? ~ Ada Limon

Desire is a tricky thing, the boiling of the body's wants, ~ Ada Limon

There remains the mystery of how the pupil devours so much bastard beauty. Abandoned property.

This land and I are rewilding. ~ Ada Limon

People have done this before, but not us. ~ Ada Limon

All night I dreamt of bonfires and burn piles
and ghosts of men, and spirits
behind those birds of flame.
I cannot tell anymore when a door opens or closes,
I can only hear the frame saying, Walk through. ~ Ada Limon

I denied it,
this new land. But love, I'll concede this:
whatever state you are, I'll be that state's bird,
the loud, obvious blur of song people point to
when they wonder where it is you've gone. ~ Ada Limon

Here is my sacrifice: my hummingbird landing in a stranger's palm. ~ Ada Limon

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. ~ Ada Limon

What I didn't like was how people talked to me
now that I was no longer single; they were nicer.
Men who never looked at me would start up a conversation,
like I was suddenly some safer form of fire. ~ Ada Limon

I know
you don't always understand,
but let me point to the first
wet drops landing on the stones,
the noise like fingers drumming
the skin. I can't help it. I will
never get over making everything
such a big deal. ~ Ada Limon

Precise, graceful, and generous, the poems in SuperLoop, seem to be born out of a deep, careful attention and a profound compassion. Sometimes the quiet observer, sometimes the kid in the center of the messed-up carnival, these poems are the fireflies you've missed all winter, the longed-for return of the bees. Unaffected and inherently hopeful, Callihan's work is as merciful as it is moving. ~ Ada Limon

I will play on this blessed earth until I die. ~ Ada Limon

Bellow

"Tell the range and all that's howling,
the flickers of life beyond the weeds,
the vulture's furrowed brow of flight,
the blasted sticky Canadian lawn thistle;
tell the clowned-out clouds and the rain,
and all that makes you go quiet again,
tell them that you didn't come here
to make a fuss, or break, or growl, or
scream; tell them-crazy sky and stars
between-tell them you didn't come
to disturb the night air and throw a fit,
then get down in the dark and do it. ~ Ada Limon

My mother's psychic says, everyone essentially wants
the same thing as everyone else, a sense of belonging, a coming home. ~ Ada Limon

All I've been working on is napping, and maybe being kinder to others, to myself. ~ Ada Limon

I wanted to be a hummingbird.
It made sense to long for rapid wings and the ability to hover always
to be Huitzilopochtli taming my snakes.
Sometimes though, the thought exhausts me and
I want to be a slow horse, a tennis shoe. ~ Ada Limon

...this life is a fist
of fast wishes caught by nothing
but the fishhook of tomorrow's tug. ~ Ada Limon

When I leave this earthly home and go up to God to dwell, someone will look on the heaped up grave and whisper, "She tried to do well. ~ Reverend Ada Slaton Bonds, Cumberland Presbyterian

Sebastian then turned to the redhead. I didn't want to know her name. I already had a perfectly fitting nickname for her in my head. "This is Selena Alvaro." "Please call me Lena," the girl smiled, extending a manicured hand. I shook it politely. Whatever Sebastian's issue was, I wasn't going to give him the satisfaction of showing that I cared. "Do you know Bast well?" she asked me.
Ugh. That nickname again. "I guess not," I replied curtly, shooting him a pointed look. "He's just one of the vampires in town. ~ Ada Adams

Some of his transactions involved Ada policemen, specifically one Dennis Corvin, whom Gore described as a primary supplier ~ John Grisham

I said I wasn't going to hurt you!" he growled, pinning me even further into the soft, wet earth.
"But I never said that I wouldn't hurt you!" I snapped.
He brought his face toward mine. "I'd like to see you try," he whispered. ~ Ada Adams

Children of her type contrive the purest philosophies. Ada had worked out her own little system. Hardly a week had elapsed since Van's arrival when he was found worthy of being initiated in her web of wisdom. An individual's life consisted of certain classified things: "real things" which were unfrequent and priceless, simply "things" which formed the routine stuff of life; and "ghost things," also called "fogs," such as fever, toothache, dreadful disappointments, and death. Three or more things occurring at the same time formed a "tower," or, if they came in immediate succession, they made a "bridge." "Real towers" and "real bridges" were the joys of life, and when the towers came in a series, one experienced supreme rapture; it almost never happened, though. In some circumstances, in a certain light, a neutral "thing" might look or even actually become "real" or else, conversely, it might coagulate into a fetid "fog." When the joy and the joyless happened to be intermixed, simultaneously or along the ramp of duration, one was confronted with "ruined towers" and "broken bridges. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Life became colourful and wild as Ada danced through night and day. She danced so fiercely that she forgot what day it was or even her own name. ~ Meara O'Hara

Look, I was a hungry shade, nothing more. I latched onto the men, and their energy felt like sticky fruit sliding between my fingers. and when we were done, I was still hungry. And after the next time. I was still hungry. And after the one after that one, I was still hungry. I would have drowned them all. I would have inched slowly over their bodies, dipped my fingers inside their throats and ripped out sounds. I filled their bed with secrets. Ada was right- I found pleasure in evil. I did many things in hunger that could be misconstrued. ~ Akwaeke Emezi

We have 11 great potato flavors, and customers have been clamoring for tortilla. For over a year, we worked to develop the four flavors of tortilla popchips: chili limon, nacho cheese, ranch and salsa. They're made with traditional stoneground masa, are gluten-free, and have less than half the fat of other chips. ~ Keith Belling

I was born in Jerusalem in 1939 to a poor family that shared a rented four-room apartment with two additional families and their children. ~ Ada Yonath

The cabins they passed among seemed solemn in their abandonment, cramped by the watercourse and the overhanging brow of the cloudy mountain. Some of its people might yet be living, and Ada wondered how often they remembered this lonesome place, now still as a held breath. Whatever word they had called it would soon be numbered among the names of things which have not been passed down to us and are exiled from our memories. She doubted that its people, even in the last days, had ever looked ahead and imagined loss so total and so soon. they had not foreseen a near time when theirs would be another world filled with other people whose mouths would speak other words, whose sleep would be eased or troubled with other dreams, whose prayers would be offered up to other gods. ~ Charles Frazier

It isn't only the Utopians who become a little more immortal with every blade they take away. It isn't only they who delight in seeing unicorns and wingrays in the street, who gaze through Griffincloth into enchanting nowheres, and ride the shuttles to the brave, bare Moon, which their efforts make a little less bare every day. We all enjoy these wonders, all of us, all Hives, all Hiveless. Reader, you should not have barred Apollo Mojave from the Pantheon. ~ Ada Palmer

The Eastern allusion bit me again. "I'll not stand you an inch in the stead of a seraglio," I said; "so don't consider me an equivalent for one. If you have a fancy for anything in that line, away with you, sir, to the bazaars of Stamboul without delay, and lay out in extensive slave-purchases some of that spare cash you seem at a loss to spend satisfactorily here. ~ Charlotte Bronte

Break a promise to the dead and they'll haunt you, Ada says. Keep the promise and they'll haunt you just the same. ~ Jennifer Donnelly

ADA Cher Reo was sleeping off a night of drunken revelry like the rest of them, so that would be handy. ~ J.D. Robb

Problems should be solved by talking and not in an aggressive manner. ~ Ada Yonath

The first place to start is on enforcement. We who got the ADA passed did the hard part, the heavy lifting. ~ Major Owens

When a man sits in our jails for a number of years, and around him friends and family become angry, that is how we create terrorists. ~ Ada Yonath

She suspected him of infidelity, with and without reason, morning, noon and night. ~ Ada Leverson

I want to say that one day you and your husband will fight about missed flights, and you'll find yourself wistful for the days when you had to pay for only your own mistakes. I want to say that at various points in your marriage, may it last forever, you will look at this person and feel only rage. You will gaze at this man you once adored and think, It sure would be nice to have this whole place to myself. ~ Ada Calhoun

Nothing was more up-to-date when it was built, or is more obsolete today, than the railroad station. ~ Ada Louise Huxtable

I stared at the paper. I said, "This isn't reading. This is drawing." "Writing," she corrected. "It's like buttons and hems. You've got to learn those before you can sew on the machine. You've got to know your letters before you can read." I supposed so, but it was boring. When I said so she got up again and wrote something along the bottom of the paper. "What's that?" I asked. "'Ada is a curmudgeon,'" she replied. "Ada is a curmudgeon," I copied at the end of my alphabet. It pleased me. After ~ Kimberly Brubaker Bradley

She started to scream. She screamed and screamed and screamed. Her vision was numb. There was a window in front of her but it opened into a nothingness like the one yawning from her mouth. Somewhere she could hear a building sound, a wind, huge and wide, rushing out of the void, rushing toward her. The walls, the veils in her head, they tore, they ripped, they collapsed. The wind rushed over his empty voice and the Ada thought with a sudden final clarity--
She has come. She has come for me at last. ~ Akwaeke Emezi

All the couples therapy and communication seminars in the world won't save you if you aren't prepared to close your eyes and hug the mainmast through a storm. ~ Ada Calhoun

Wherever they might be they always remember that the past was a lie, that memory has no return, that every spring gone by could never be recovered, and that the wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end. ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Forsaking all others means going deep with one person -- exhaustingly deep. ~ Ada Calhoun

To a woman
I mean, a nice woman
there is no such thing as men. There is a man; and either she is so fond of him that she can talk of nothing else, however unfavourably, or so much in love with him that she never mentions his name. ~ Ada Leverson

Forget this world and all its troubles and if possible
its multitudinous Charlatans
everything in short but
the Enchantress of Numbers. ~ Ada Lovelace

And as the train whistled its imminent departure, a small girl wearing neat plaits and someone else's shoes climbed its iron stairs. Smoke filled the platform, people waved and hollered, a stray dog ran barking through the crowds. Nobody noticed as the little girl stepped over the shadowed threshold; not even Aunt Ada, who some might've expected to be sheperherding her orphaned niece towards her uncertain future. And so, when the essence of light and life that had been Vivien Longmeyer contracted itself for safekeeping and disappeared deep inside her, the world kept moving and nobody saw it happen. ~ Kate Morton

We might even invent laws for series or formula in an arbitrary manner, and set the engine to work upon them, and thus deduce numerical results which we might not otherwise have thought of obtaining; but this would hardly perhaps in any instance be productive of any great practical utility, or calculated to rank higher than as a philosophical amusement. ~ Ada Lovelace

A constellation of Utopians is a group which only seems a group to us because we seek familiar institutions in their government, as we use the shapes of beasts and heroes to make false sense of the sea of stars. ~ Ada Palmer

It was an intense embrace, no awkwardness, no holding back, the kind of hug two people can only achieve after long intimacy, but anyone can give in an instant to a stuffed bear. ~ Ada Palmer

Well, it's more like a sentence on life," he said, grinning. "I live by three rules: Don't dwell on the past, present, or future, party hard, and never fall in love. Easy. ~ Ada Adams

It may be desirable to explain, that by the word operation, we mean any process which alters the mutual relation of two or more things, be this relation of what kind it may. This is the most general definition, and would include all subjects in the universe. ~ Ada Lovelace

The Ada could look back on her life and see, like clones, several of her standing there in a line. This terrified her, because if there were so many of her, then which one was she? Were they false and her current self real, or was her current self false and it was one of the others, lost in the line, who was the real Ada? ~ Akwaeke Emezi

Celibacy is the most extreme of sexual perversions, after all. ~ Ada Palmer

Have all the hopes of ages come to naught? Is life no more with noble meaning fraught? ~ Ada Cambridge

One essential object is to choose that arrangement which shall tend to reduce to a minimum the time necessary for completing the calculation. ~ Ada Lovelace

Until the first blow fell, no one was convinced that Penn Station really would be demolished, or that New York would permit this monumental act of vandalism against one of the largest and finest landmarks of its age of Roman elegance. Any city gets what it admires, will pay for, and, ultimately, deserves. Even when we had Penn Station, we couldn't afford to keep it clean. We want and deserve tin-can architecture in a tinhorn culture. And we will probably be judged not by the monuments we build but by those we have destroyed ~ Ada Louise Huxtable

After Saachi left, the Ada sank even more into her books, by instinct, separating herself from this world and disappearing into others. She read everywhere: on the toilet, at the dining table, in the library before school assembly each morning. It is not clear how much saving these books were capable of. ~ Akwaeke Emezi

The confusion, the difficulties, the contradictions which, in consequence of a want of accurate distinctions in this particular, have up to even a recent period encumbered mathematics in all those branches involving the consideration of negative and impossible quantities, will at once occur to the reader who is at all versed in this science, and would alone suffice to justify dwelling somewhat on the point, in connexion with any subject so peculiarly fitted to give forcible illustration of it as the Analytical Engine. ~ Ada Lovelace

Would not exchange this one little English girl for the Grand Turk's whole seraglio, gazelle-eyes, houri forms, and all! ~ Charlotte Bronte

I thought that you said that your name was reserved only for family." A small smile broke through his stoic expression.
"The way I see it, even if you don't come around and realize that you can't resist my striking looks and enticing charm, and that you desperately want to spend the rest of your life in my arms - "
"Which will never happen ... "
" - you'll eventually end up with my silly little brother. Who, just to warn you, despite being a great guy, is nowhere near as handsome and charming as I. ~ Ada Adams

He ran a finger down my cheek. "Time is a commodity right now, Red. Wait too long and it might be too late."
I swallowed hard. Went still as my stomach clenched with dread. Hadn't Maisie said almost those exact same words to me in New York when she'd encouraged me to admit my feelings to Ada? "I know."
He leaned forward and placed another soft kiss on my lips. When he pulled away, he held my gaze. "Soon, Sabina. ~ Jaye Wells

(Personally, I have avoided many fights by going to bed angry and waking up to realize that I'd just been tired.) ~ Ada Calhoun