Top 100 Trista Mateer Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I know that I am lucky to be alive at the same time as you. I know that finding you was a cosmic needle in a haystack, a joke of Internet cables and telephone wires. But I also know that you are more afraid of opening up than losing me.”

— Trista Mateer

2. “What brings us together will always be more powerful than what keeps us apart.”

— Trista Mateer

3. “I taste like salt. You taste like toothpaste. There’s no poetry in that. It’s just life.”

— Trista Mateer

4. “Regardless of whether you desire it, love is what sits at the core of the world. It is stronger than greed and hate and jealousy and pain. What brings us together will always be more powerful than what keeps us apart.”

— Trista Mateer

5. “Love was a museum where we took down the art that was there before us and played masterpiece with all the empty space.”

— Trista Mateer

6. “My pain has always deserved a voice and I will not deny it that, but I won’t devote my life to it either.”

— Trista Mateer

7. “I know I have bigger problems than who I’m not kissing right now but three margaritas in, I wonder how safe your number is in my phone.”

— Trista Mateer

8. “I know I don’t feel like myself but I’m starting to forget what that felt like at all.”

— Trista Mateer

9. “I had to step back for a while to get to know myself again but now I don’t know how to step forward.”

— Trista Mateer

10. “No one can take your story from you if you know how to wield words. Their voices may be many but yours will be honest. You have the power to right wrongs and sing truths. You still have the pen in your hand no matter what you choose to do with it.”

— Trista Mateer

11. “I Swear Somewhere This Works In a parallel universe or another world or a different life, we sit across from each other at the kitchen table and go over the grocery list.”

— Trista Mateer

12. “I promised no more poetry and I’d rather think of this as a confession: you are still the first person I want to share new things with.”

— Trista Mateer

13. “Like everyone called a woman, they say I had no childhood. They say I rose from the sea fully formed, forced to bear the weight of other people’s desire. It’s not the truth, but it’s close enough.”

— Trista Mateer

14. “Let me leave you with this: your life is short and all the more precious for it. I do not seek to tell you how to live, only to live at all. to not fear the day. to know you are stronger than what has hurt you. to know that you will triumph.”

— Trista Mateer

15. “This is what the poems are for: telling other people the things I can no longer tell you.”

— Trista Mateer

16. “Some people are born flight risks. It is no shortcoming of yours that they cannot keep their feet on the ground. It is not your fault that they cannot seem to stand in place. They are not leaving you; they are just leaving.”

— Trista Mateer

17. “In Troy they fought over Helen like children but Achilles mourned Patroclus the way a soul mourns a body.”

— Trista Mateer

18. “The poet lusts after emotionally unavailable people because she doesn’t have to worry about commitment. The poet desperately wants commitment.”

— Trista Mateer

19. “I am as reliable as public transportation. I have hands made of guardrails and a train station heart; it is full of strangers always trying to get somewhere else. It’s not a final destination.”

— Trista Mateer

20. “The thing about embracing your own chaos is that it never becomes clear when you need to stop.”

— Trista Mateer

21. “I’m still trying to figure out who I am alone so that I know who I am in front of other people.”

— Trista Mateer

22. “It is simple. You believe in the triumphs of love despite growing up in full view of its defeat because you are brave.”

— Trista Mateer

23. “I’m trying to remember to make room in my life for the person I am now, not just the people I have been.”

— Trista Mateer

24. “I still write poems for you the same way other people bring flowers to graves.”

— Trista Mateer

25. “You are not defined by the people you walk away from, and you are not defined by the people who walk away from you.”

— Trista Mateer

26. “I’m afraid of driving and wanting to crash on purpose.”

— Trista Mateer

27. “Sometimes I think I resented you so much it felt like love.”

— Trista Mateer

28. “I will greet you with a mouth full of barbed wire until you learn to stop coming after me with your hands.”

— Trista Mateer

29. “My father was the kind of man who would always pull over at the site of an accident to offer help even if phone calls had already been made, even if people were already there. It was his sole redeeming quality; he ran away only from the messes he made.”

— Trista Mateer

30. “Even a match remembers the moment before it was struck.”

— Trista Mateer

31. “There was a time when I treated red flags like roses, happy to be handed anything.”

— Trista Mateer

32. “And you might curse the one who teaches you what it feels like to cry at the bottom of the shower in the middle of the night, but it is important to learn how to get back up on your own feet and let the wolf in your throat howl at the moon once in a while.”

— Trista Mateer

33. “And now that I am older, I don’t give a damn about sin. I will be the first to cast one.”

— Trista Mateer

34. “Walking away from you feels like not taking care of myself.”

— Trista Mateer

35. “It’s just that I am selfish and gas is expensive and it’s hard to tell the difference between wanting to die and just wanting to sink for a while. It’s just that I knew a boy once who said those words to me only when he wanted my undivided attention and my legs spread in the back of his car. It’s just that I thought it was one thing to want to die and another thing to pick up kitchen knives.”

— Trista Mateer

36. “I do not tell her that sometimes it feels like compromising yourself is part of growing up.”

— Trista Mateer

37. “I’m afraid of never loving someone as much as I loved the last person who broke my heart.”

— Trista Mateer

38. “A BRIEF INTERLUDE It’s been three years since I’ve spent the night with someone who liked me enough to get breakfast in the morning. Still, I spread my heart thin like butter on toast, hoping someone else will come along and snatch it off my plate. Still, I stumble half-dressed out of other people’s apartments and treat myself to coffee on the way home. This is not a poem that seeks to make a spectacle of loneliness.”

— Trista Mateer

39. “If we both look at the same moon and you still want to call to say goodnight then maybe we’re not looking at the same moon anymore.”

— Trista Mateer

40. “I thought I could walk away from love and it would let me.”

— Trista Mateer

41. “I keep rewriting this poem. I want it to make more sense. I want it to be less honest.”

— Trista Mateer

42. “I still wake up with things to tell you.”

— Trista Mateer

43. “My brother talks about car accidents the same way I talk about family. I don’t know when he learned to forgive. I don’t remember teaching him that. I don’t remember learning it myself. His life’s ambition is to be the man my father never was: to step up to the plate, to grow into a firefighter’s uniform or ride shotgun in an ambulance. I am still stuck on the bathroom floor with my resentment.”

— Trista Mateer

44. “The poet can’t stand the quiet. She can’t stand the buzzing in her head. The murmur of memory. The poet picks up a book of poetry. It is not her writing but it reads the same way. It is not her story but the ending is similar enough to pass. The poet tries to read a verse out loud and only tastes blood in her mouth. The poet worries she is writing the same poem over and over. No matter what words she puts down, it comes out with a bite.”

— Trista Mateer

45. “Love knows no face. Love knows no gender. Love knows no sexuality. Love knows only love. We waste so much time trying to explain ourselves.”

— Trista Mateer

46. “I don’t know what it is in me that yearns to be the lifeboat that people throw themselves at when they are drowning.”

— Trista Mateer

47. “The poet is afraid to make any place feel too much like home because then she might have to stop running.”

— Trista Mateer

48. “Girl like a garden you never volunteered to tend. Dirt all tracked into your front hall.”

— Trista Mateer

49. “Men said she was the perfect vessel for evil to enter the world, but men are the ones who wrote the stories. Men wrote the myths down and called them history, and time has dragged them further form the truth. Pandora’s jar became a box. Eve’s pomegranate, an apple. All the details change but one: it is a woman with her hand on the door to Hell.”

— Trista Mateer

50. “All the details change but one: it is a woman with her hand on the door to Hell.”

— Trista Mateer