Top 40 Ada Limon Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “People have done this before, but not us.”

— Ada Limon

2. “Poetry is a place where both grief and grace can live, where rage can be explored and examined, not simply exploited.”

— Ada Limon

3. “I want to give you something, or I want to take something from you. But I want to feel the exchange, the warm hand on the shoulder, the song coming out and the ear holding onto it.”

— Ada Limon

4. “Look, we are not unspectacular things. We’ve come this far, survived this much. What would happen if we decided to survive more? To love harder?”

— Ada Limon

5. “Not so much living, but a hovering without sense.”

— Ada Limon

6. “Caring for each other is a form of radical survival that we don’t always take into account.”

— Ada Limon

7. “I swear, I’ll try harder not to miss as much: the tree, or how your fingers under still sleep-stunned sheets coaxed all my colors back.”

— Ada Limon

8. “If you live, you look back and beg for it again, the hazardous bliss before you know what you would miss.”

— Ada Limon

9. “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 them, and it and sky.”

— Ada Limon

10. “I remembered what had been circling in me: I am beautiful. I am full of love. I am dying.”

— Ada Limon

11. “I imagine what it must be like to stay hidden, disappear in the dusky nothing and stay still in the night. It’s not sadness, though it may sound like it. I’m thinking about people and trees and how I wish I could be silent more, be more tree than anything else, less clumsy and loud, less crow, more cool white pine, and how it’s hard not to always want something else, not just to let the savage grass grow.”

— Ada Limon

12. “I am in no hurry to stop believing we are supposed to sway like this, that we too are immense and calling out.”

— Ada Limon

13. “Don’t think about Laika in orbit. Don’t think about cringe and catastrophe.”

— Ada Limon

14. “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

15. “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

16. “I will play on this blessed earth until I die.”

— Ada Limon

17. “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

18. “All I’ve been working on is napping, and maybe being kinder to others, to myself.”

— Ada Limon

19. “You say you love the world, so love the world.”

— Ada Limon

20. “I’m thirty-five and remember all that I’ve done wrong.”

— Ada Limon

21. “I loved them: my own bright dead things. I’m thirty-five and remember all that I’ve done wrong. Yesterday I was nice, but in truth I resented the contentment of the field. Why must we practice this surrender? What I mean is: there are days I still want to kill the carrots because I can.”

— Ada Limon

22. “I’ll never see you again, but that’s a note I tear up in my mind.”

— Ada Limon

23. “How good it is to love live things, even when what they’ve done is terrible, how much we each want to be the pure exonerated creature, to be turned loose into our own wide open without a single harness of sin to stop us.”

— Ada Limon

24. “Perhaps we are hurtling our bodies towards the thing that will obliterate us, begging for love from the speeding passage of time...”

— Ada Limon

25. “Humans are so strange in the ways that we are either recovering too quickly from something or holding on to pain forever. There seems to be no middle ground. We bounce back or we wallow. But remembering the hardest moments of grief or loss and letting them be present for you in the good moments is something I’ve found useful and grounding as I age. It feels like a way of remembering that balance does exist. This too. This grief. This joy. Together always intertwined.”

— Ada Limon

26. “Sometimes, you have to look around at the life you’ve made and sort of nod at it, like someone moving their head up and down to a tune they like.”

— Ada Limon

27. “What is it about noticing beauty that brings you out of yourself and returns you to yourself?”

— Ada Limon

28. “Before, the only thing I was interested in was love, how it grips you, how it terrifies you, how it annihilates and resuscitates you. I didn’t know then that it wasn’t even love that I was interested in but my own suffering. I thought suffering kept things interesting. How funny that I called it love and the whole time it was pain.”

— Ada Limon

29. “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

30. “Darling Cockroaches of the Highest Order, hard underthings of hard underworlds, I am utterly suspicious of advice.”

— Ada Limon

31. “It’s been a long time since I’ve wanted to die, it makes me feel like taking off my skin suit and seeing how my light flies all on its own, neon and bouncy like a wannabe star.”

— Ada Limon

32. “Even now, I don’t know much about happiness. I still worry and want an endless stream of more, but some days I can see the point in growing something, even if it’s just to say I cared enough.”

— Ada Limon

33. “How masterful and mad is hope.”

— Ada Limon

34. “I think a lot about the word tenacity. What it takes to survive in a world that is sometimes beautiful and sometimes hostile. I’m always amazed at the body’s willingness to continue, to keep going. The heart that keeps pumping, the lungs that keep breathing, the way the will to live can outsmart those other dark voices inside.”

— Ada Limon

35. “How strange this silent longing for death, as if you could make the sun not come up, the world’s wheeling and wheeling its seasons like a cruel continuation of stubborn force.”

— Ada Limon

36. “I thought power was something you could control. Something one could do at a desk or on a job site, to work in the field of power. Now the tree is gone. The men are gone, just a ground-down stump where what felt like wisdom once was.”

— Ada Limon

37. “One question that I often get asked is how to overcome writer’s block. And the funny thing is, I overcome it, by not overcoming it. I think it’s okay to not write. I think it’s okay not to talk, not to make, not to create, not to produce, produce, produce. How can we listen to the world if we are always talking to the world?”

— Ada Limon

38. “You can’t really stop going places because you’re frightened.”

— Ada Limon

39. “Sometimes I think the memory of an event is better than the event itself.”

— Ada Limon

40. “The other day someone I know posted a quote from the poet Mary Oliver, “Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?” And I almost began to cry. I kept thinking of how scared I’ve been, how scared many of us have been during these years of the pandemic. And of course, it’s not just the pandemic, so many overwhelming fears. I read that quote and I suddenly longed for breath. For relief. For the end of fear.”

— Ada Limon

41. “Mercy is not frozen in time, but flits about frantically, unsure where to land.”

— Ada Limon

42. “Mostly, I enjoy my failings. Until I don’t.”

— Ada Limon

43. “Annie Dillard once wrote, “How we spend our days is of course how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour and that one is what we are doing.” I think about this a lot when I’m planning my day and what sort of pleasure I might suck out of its marrow during these tumultuous times of constant upheaval and war. Sometimes that means noticing even the most mundane of tasks in order to know we are alive, that we are living.”

— Ada Limon