Top 150 Andrea Gibson Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “When the first responders entered the Pulse Nightclub after the massacre in Orlando, they walked through the horrific scene of bodies and called out, “If you’re alive, raise your hand.” I was sweeping in a hotel in the midwest at the time but I imagine in that exact moment my hand twitched in my sleep – some unconscious part of me aware, that I had a pulse. That I was alive.”

— Andrea Gibson

102. “This life is built almost entirely of love and losing, isn’t it?”

— Andrea Gibson

103. “I swear to god if I had an Adam’s apple, I’d tell her to peel it and take a bite.”

— Andrea Gibson

104. “Patriarchy taught me how to take a punch better than I could take a compliment.”

— Andrea Gibson

105. “This is for the times you went through hell so someone else wouldn’t have to.”

— Andrea Gibson

106. “Just me and my suitcase, hanging out wit the sun, learning how to pack light.”

— Andrea Gibson

107. “I am so grateful for having a mind that can be changed.”

— Andrea Gibson

108. “Coming into our own humanity often takes enormous effort, commitment and bravery. I believe we should be taught that at an early age. I believe part of the violence of our culture stirs from the myth is kindness is natural. I think kindness would only be natural in a world where no one is hurt, and everyone is hurt. So kindness is work. Kindness is knees in the garden weeding our bites, our apathies, our cold shoulders, our silences, our cruelties, whatever taught us the world ‘ugly’.”

— Andrea Gibson

109. “I met a woman and we were lying in her bed, about to kiss for the very first time. Just before our lips touched she jumped up and ran to her closet and grabbed a stethoscope. She came back to the bed, put the earpieces in my ears, slipped the disc down her shirt onto her heart, and whispered, ‘I want you to listen to my heart speed up when you kiss me.’ And I kissed her, and I listened to her heart beat faster and faster and faster.”

— Andrea Gibson

110. “I grew up in the town that received the first distress signal saying the Titanic was going down. It was the only thing we were ever renowned for. In fact, we prided ourselves on our failure to save the sinking, which is maybe part of the reason I prided myself on drinking my first fifth of whiskey at twelve years old. It’s cold where I come from. I learned to drown young.”

— Andrea Gibson

111. “I stopped calling myself a pacifist when I heard Gandhi told women they should not physically fight off their rapists. I believe there is such a thing as a nonviolent fist.”

— Andrea Gibson

112. “Next time I will know it’s normal to have a hard time breathing when you shake the dust. We make everything so complicated. Sometimes, the message in the bottle is “Don’t drink so much – there’s too much Novocaine in our wisdom teeth already.”

— Andrea Gibson

113. “Something difficult to stomach in this life is the fact that we might all learn and grow at a pace that will hurt people.”

— Andrea Gibson

114. “I keep remembering being fifteen at Disneyland wearing my best friend’s hoodie like it was my boyfriend’s class ring. How many years it took me just to touch her face. How many years I sent praying my heart could play dead ‘til the threat was gone. ‘Til the world changed. ‘Til history was history.”

— Andrea Gibson

115. “I decided I was going to read only social justice poetry through my entire set. But when I was making my set list it hit me that the simple existence of the word ‘she’ in my love poem made it a political poem. Isn’t that criminal? Isn’t it criminal that love is a political thing? That the heart is a political thing?”

— Andrea Gibson

116. “I do not wear a welcome mat on my chest just so people can walk all over it fumbling with the keys to the locks they keep building for the doors I keep opening hoping someone will see the rainforest growing in my living room.”

— Andrea Gibson

117. “I know some people build their safety with walls. Me, I’m into demolition – whatever tears the walls down. I have a hard time kissing without that kind of dust in the air. I see a wrecking ball and see a wedding ring, think, “Look at the size of that stone.”

— Andrea Gibson

118. “You are the best thing that has every happened to you.”

— Andrea Gibson

119. “I suppose we wear our traumas the way the guillotine wears gravity; our lovers’ necks are so soft.”

— Andrea Gibson

120. “Listen, I know you run your mouth so your mind can rest.”

— Andrea Gibson

121. “Let’s hyperventilate like it’s 1999.”

— Andrea Gibson

122. “If love did not exist I would be so goddamn sane my poems would be billboards. Suburbia would be enough. I would not have to gut myself to find my spine crushed into powder and brushed on her cheekbones. My hair would not be a hummingbird’s nest. My mind would not have to move so fast to rest.”

— Andrea Gibson

123. “Why isn’t it okay to say there are things we have not survived?”

— Andrea Gibson

124. “When 28,000 buildings fall do you know how many walls are no longer there?”

— Andrea Gibson

125. “Science just proved that an atom can exist in two places at one time and I believe people are not always only at the scene of their crimes. Even the worst of us, I trust, are often also somewhere holy, somewhere kind.”

— Andrea Gibson

126. “Like Pac-Man, she swallows my ghosts.”

— Andrea Gibson

127. “Do you know science just proved an atom can exist in two places at the same time? No one is ever only at the scene of their crimes. Each of us is always also somewhere holy.”

— Andrea Gibson

128. “I wonder how many people have died driving while checking how many likes their Facebook status got. I wonder how much life has been lost in the bloody ditch of approval, how many skulls have swallowed windshields trying to see if they are worthy of applause, worthy of their own heart’s hungry beat.”

— Andrea Gibson

129. “My first psychotherapist told me to spend three hours each day sitting in a dark closet with my eyes closed and my ears plugged. I tried it once but couldn’t stop thinking how gay it was to be sitting in the closet.”

— Andrea Gibson

130. “Because anyone who has ever sat in lotus for more than a few seconds knows it takes a hell of a lot more muscle to stay then to go.”

— Andrea Gibson

131. “I ask you about being happy the same way my high school friends ask me about being gay. ‘So what do you people do exactly? I mean, how do you do it?”

— Andrea Gibson

132. “Love is the only war worth dying for. But every time I say ‘please, come back’, I feel like I’m trying to find a dirty needle into a haystack.”

— Andrea Gibson

133. “Tell me we’ll be naming our children Beautiful and nothing else.”

— Andrea Gibson

134. “I wrote too many poems in a language I did not yet know how to speak.”

— Andrea Gibson

135. “I think of happy when I think of you.”

— Andrea Gibson

136. “Come, love, make me better than I was. Come teach me a kinder way to say my own name.”

— Andrea Gibson

137. “Maybe sometimes you get tired of seeing people’s humanity in moments where they’re outright refusing to show us their humanity.”

— Andrea Gibson

138. “If you told her the war is over do you think she’d sleep?”

— Andrea Gibson

139. “I’m not a pessimist, I’m just thinking about how she said, ‘I love you,’ while I was having a panic attack and how that means she’s probably a liar and how she’ll likely cut off her own nose to prove me wrong and how then she won’t smell my pheromones and how then we’ll both die of lesbian bed death.”

— Andrea Gibson

140. “The present is far from gift-wrapped.”

— Andrea Gibson

141. “Is my attention on loving, or is my attention on who isn’t loving me?”

— Andrea Gibson

142. “The closest I might ever come to war is the turning of my head. Apathy is intimate, like singing a lullaby to a grenade, then drinking yourself to sleep while it sneaks out the window to explode a boy.”

— Andrea Gibson

143. “When all the good in you starts arguing with all the bad in you about who you really are, never let the bad in you make the better case.”

— Andrea Gibson

144. “There was a typo in the book. The line read, “I want to merry you.” I thought, “That’s exactly what I want to do: merry somebody.”

— Andrea Gibson

145. “I feel that sometimes when I’m writing poems – like they don’t yet fit. Do you ever feel like the best of you is something you’re still hoping to grow into?”

— Andrea Gibson

146. “Remember the time when we saw two boys kissing on the street in Kansas and we both broken down crying, ‘cause it was Kansas, and you said, ‘What are the chances of seeing anything but corn in Kansas?!’ We were born again that day. I cut your cord and you cut mine.”

— Andrea Gibson

147. “Your life each time airport security screams, Pink or blue? Pink or blue? trying to figure out which machine setting to run you through. Choosing your life and how that made you into someone who now finds it easy to explain your gender by saying you are happiest on the road, when you’re not here or there, but in-between, that yellow line coming down the center of it all like a goddamn sunbeam.”

— Andrea Gibson

148. “The worst thing that ever happened to me was not the worst thing that ever happened to me. Hating myself for it was.”

— Andrea Gibson

149. “It’s true what they say about the gays being so fashionable – our ghosts never go out of style, even life is like funeral practice: half of us already dead to our families before we die, half of us still on our knees trying to crawl into the family photo.”

— Andrea Gibson

150. “I think the hardest people in the world to forgive are the people we once were, the people we are trying desperately to not stir into the recipe of who we are now.”

— Andrea Gibson