25+ Li-Young Lee Quotes On Education, Friendship And World

Li-Young Lee is an American poet of Chinese descent. He was born in 1957 in Jakarta, Indonesia, and immigrated to the United States with his family in 1964. His poetry is known for its exploration of themes of family, faith, and identity. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Li-Young Lee on life, love, education.

Top 10 Li-Young Lee Quotes

1. People who read poetry have heard about the burning bush, but when you write poetry, you sit inside the burning bush.
2. Memory is sweet. Even when it’s painful, memory is sweet.
3. Every time you write a poem it’s apocalyptic. You’re revealing who you really are to yourself.
4. Poetry is the language of extremity. Poetry is a transfer of potency. You feel something potent and then you transfer it onto the page.
5. Some things never leave a person: scent of the hair of one you love, the texture of persimmons, in your palm, the ripe weight.
6. In writing poetry, all of one's attention is focused on some inner voice.
7. 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.
8. The lyric self is the self; the narrative self is not.
9. 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.
10. While all bodies share the same fate, all voices do not.

Li-Young Lee Short Quotes

• We suffer each other to have each other a while.
• The knowledge that it takes to write a poem gets burnt up in the writing of the poem.
• Could it be in longing we are most ourselves?
• Brimming. That's what it is, I want to get to a place where my sentences enact brimming.
• And I never believed that the multitude / of dreams and many words were vain.
• A poem is like a score for the human voice.
• Maybe being winged means being wounded by infinity.

Li-Young Lee Quotes About Body

A bruise, blue in the muscle, you impinge upon me. As bone hugs the ache home, so I'm vexed to love you, your body the shape of returns, your hair a torso of light, your heat I must have, your opening I'd eat, each moment of that soft-finned fruit, inverted fountain in which I don't see me. — Li-Young Lee

I am that last, that final thing, the body in a white sheet listening, — Li-Young Lee

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. — Li-Young Lee

Li-Young Lee Famous Quotes And Sayings

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. — Li-Young Lee

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. — Li-Young Lee

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. — Li-Young Lee

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. — Li-Young Lee

To pull the metal splinter from my palm my father recited a story in a low voice. I watched his lovely face and not the blade. Before the story ended, he'd removed the iron sliver I thought I'd die from. I can't remember the tale, but hear his voice still, a well of dark water, a prayer. And I recall his hands, two measures of tenderness he laid against my face. — Li-Young Lee

Life Lessons by Li-Young Lee

1. Li-Young Lee's work emphasizes the importance of understanding and appreciating one's heritage and culture. He often draws on his own Chinese-American upbringing to explore themes of identity, family, and loss.
2. Li-Young Lee's poetry is also a reminder to be mindful of the present moment and to savor the beauty of life. He encourages readers to take time to appreciate the small moments and to be grateful for the people and experiences that shape us.
3. Through his work, Li-Young Lee encourages readers to reflect on their own lives and to find meaning and purpose in the stories of their past. He emphasizes the power of language to connect us to our history and to ourselves.