Top Li-Young Lee Quotes - Quotesmemo.com

Li-Young Lee Biography

Li-Young Lee (李立揚, pinyin: Lǐ Lìyáng) (born August 19, 1957) is an American poet. He was born in Jakarta, Indonesia, to Chinese parents. His maternal great-grandfather was Yuan Shikai, China's first Republican President, who attempted to make himself emperor. Lee's father, who was a personal physician to Mao Zedong while in China, relocated his family to Indonesia, where he helped found Gamaliel University. His father was exiled and spent 19 months in an Indonesian prison camp in Macau. In 1959 the Lee family fled the country to escape anti-Chinese sentiment and after a five-year trek through Hong Kong and Japan, they settled in the United States in 1964. Li-Young Lee attended the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Arizona, and the State University of New York at Brockport.

Read about Li-Young Lee in Wikipedia

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Li-Young Lee Quotes

Our bodies look solid, but they arent. Were like a fountain. A fountain of water looks solid, but you can put your fingers right through it. Our bodies look like things, but theres no thingness to them.

Bodies, Body, Fingers, Looks, Thingness, Water

I am that last, that final thing, the body in a white sheet listening.

Finals, Listening, Thing, White

Maybe being winged means being wounded by infinity.

Infinity, Maybe, Mean, Winged, Wounded

There are days we live as if death were nowhere in the background; from joy to joy to joy, from wing to wing, from blossom to blossom to impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

Background, Joy, Nowhere, Sweet, Wing, Wings

Poetry is the language of extremity. Poetry is a transfer of potency. You feel something potent and then you transfer it onto the page.

Language, Onto, Pages, Poetry, Potency, Transfer

In writing poetry, all of one's attention is focused on some inner voice.

Attention, Poetry, Voice, Writing

Memory revises me. Even now a letter comes from a place I don’t know, from someone with my name and postmarked years ago, while I await injunctions from the light or the dark; I wait for shapeliness limned, or dissolution. Is paradise due or narrowly missed until another thousand years? I wait in a blue hour and faraway noise of hammering, and on a page a poem begun, something about to be dispersed, something about to come into being.

Dark, Dispersed, Light, Memories, Poem

I've been thinking about something for a long time, and I keep noticing that most human speech-if not all human speech-is made with the outgoing breath. This is the strange thing about presence and absence. When we breath in, our bodies are filled with nutrients and nourishment. Our blood is filled with oxygen, our skin gets flush; our bones get harder-they get compacted. Our muscles get toned and we feel very present when we're breathing in. The problem is, that when we're breathing in, we can't speak. So presence and silence have something to do with each other.

Blood, Breathing, Outgoing, Problem, Thinking

A poem is like a score for the human voice.

Humans, Poem, Score, Voice

Some things never leave a person: scent of the hair of one you love, the texture of persimmons, in your palm, the ripe weight.

Hair, Texture, Things, Weight

While all bodies share the same fate, all voices do not.

Bodies, Body, Fate, Voice, Voices

That's what I want, that kind of recklessness where the poem is even ahead of you. It's like riding a horse that's a little too wild for you, so there's this tension between what you can do and what the horse decides it's going to do.

Ahead, Horse, Kind, Riding, Want, Wild

The problem with memory is that is changes whatever it touches. It is never that accurate. As a result, I end up modifying and revising my own experiences. It's myth making.

Accurate, Changes, Memories, Problem, Result, Storytelling

The lyric self is the self; the narrative self is not.

Lyric, Narrative, Self

A door jumps out from shadows, then jumps away. This is what I've come to find: the back door, unlatched. Tooled by insular wind, it slams and slams without meaning to and without meaning.

Doors, Insular, Jumps, Shadow, Tooled, Wind

Could it be in longing we are most ourselves?

Longing

Every time you write a poem it’s apocalyptic. You’re revealing who you really are to yourself.

Apocalyptic, Poem, Revealing, Write, Writing

I don't mind suffering as long as it's really about something. I don't mind great luck, if it's about something. If it's the hollow stuff, then there's no gift, one way or the other.

Hollow, Long, Luck, Mind, Stuff