a list of my favorite quotes from books read in 2022, in no particular order

• do not, however, make the mistake of thinking that all desire is yearning. “we love to contemplate blue, not because it advances to us, but because it draws us after it,” wrote goethe, and perhaps he is right. but i am not interested in longing to live in a world in which i already live. i don’t want to yearn for blue things, and god forbid for any “blueness.” above all, i want to stop missing you. (bluets, maggie nelson)
• her skin was soft, softer than i remembered, as if she was rotten too, a fallen eve. (paradise rot, jenny hval)
• it’s bad poetry to have a body and a bad life too to get everything you wanted but still walk away for no other reason but ........... the unspecified wrongness of your blood & all you can do is lie face down on the carpet & wait for the heart to finish buffering. (hera lindsay bird, hera lindsay bird)
• no one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark. i’ve been carrying the old anthem in my mouth for so long that there’s no space for another song, another tongue or another language. I know a shame that shrouds, totally engulfs. i tore up and ate my own passport in an airport hotel. i’m bloated with language i can’t afford to forget. (teaching my mother how to give birth, warsan shire)