44 Andrea Gibson Quotes
to make you feel something
Who is Andrea Gibson? A brief background…
Andrea Gibson is an American poet and activist from Calais, Maine, who has lived in Boulder, Colorado since 1999.
Their poetry focuses on gender norms, politics, social reform, and the struggles LGBTQ people face in today’s society.
Gibson uses gender-neutral pronouns, specifically they/their. Many of their poems are about gender identity, such as “Swing Set” and “Andrew”. Gibson has said, regarding gender, “I don’t necessarily identify within a gender binary. I’ve never in my life really felt like a woman and I’ve certainly never felt like a man. I look at gender on a spectrum and I feel somewhere on that spectrum that’s not landing on either side of that.”
Activism and Poetry
In addition to using poetry to provide social and political commentary on gender and LGBTQ issues, Gibson is involved with many activist groups, and also performs at Take Back the Night events. For twenty years, Gibson performed with Vox Feminista, a “performance tribe of radical feminists bent on social change through cultural revolution.”
In 2013, alongside Kelsey Gibb, Gibson launched the website and support system, Stay Here With Me. The tumblr account for Stay Here With Me presents it as “an interactive, safe space offering collective support while encouraging individual healing to keep those who visit alive today, and wanting to stay alive until tomorrow.
A four-time Denver Grand Slam Champion, Gibson finished fourth at the 2004 National Poetry Slam, and third at both the 2006 and 2007 Individual World Poetry Slam. In 2008, Gibson became the first poet ever to win the Women of the World Poetry Slam (WOWps) in Detroit.
In 2008, Gibson published their first book, Pole Dancing To Gospel Hymns. This was followed by The Madness Vase and Pansy, all published by Write Bloody Publishing. Gibson has also written and published Take Me With You, a book of quotes and phrases and illustrated by Sarah J. Coleman. Most recently, they came out with Lord of the Butterflies.
The albumYellowbird incorporates music with spoken word. Confronting fear was a theme in poems of the following album, Flower Boy. Gibson also released Truce in 2013, followed by Hey Galaxy in 2018.
“A doctor once told me I feel too much. I said, so does god. that’s why you can see the grand canyon from the moon.”
44 Andrea Gibson Quotes to make you feel something
1. “I said to the sun, ‘Tell me about the big bang.’ The sun said, ‘it hurts to become.
2. “and I wonder if Beethoven held his breath
the first time his fingers touched the keys
the same way a soldier holds his breath
the first time his finger clicks the trigger.
We all have different reasons for forgetting to breathe.”
3. “You are not weak just because your heart feels so heavy.”
4. “When your heart is broken, you plant seeds in the cracks and pray for rain.”
5. “A doctor once told me I feel too much. I said, so does god. that’s why you can see the grand canyon from the moon.”
6. “Before I die, I want to be somebody’s favorite hiding place, the place they can put everything they know they need to survive, every secret, every solitude, every nervous prayer, and be absolutely certain I will keep it safe. I will keep it safe.”
“Before I die, I want to be somebody’s favorite hiding place, the place they can put everything they know they need to survive, every secret, every solitude, every nervous prayer, and be absolutely certain I will keep it safe. I will keep it safe.”
7. “I’m never gonna wait
that extra twenty minutes
to text you back,
and I’m never gonna play
hard to get
when I know your life
has been hard enough already.
When we all know everyone’s life
has been hard enough already
it’s hard to watch
the game we make of love,
like everyone’s playing checkers
with their scars,
saying checkmate
whenever they get out
without a broken heart.
Just to be clear
I don’t want to get out
without a broken heart.
I intend to leave this life
so shattered
there’s gonna have to be
a thousand separate heavens
for all of my flying parts.”
“I’d cut my soul into a million different pieces just to form a constellation to light your way home. I’d write love poems to the parts of yourself you can’t stand. I’d stand in the shadows of your heart and tell you I’m not afraid of your dark.”
8. “Now every time I hear the word love I think going, going,
The first week you were gone,
I kept seeing your hand wave goodbye
Like a windshield wiper in a flooding car
In the last real moment I believed the hurricane would let me out alive.”
9. “I’d cut my soul into a million different pieces just to form a constellation to light your way home. I’d write love poems to the parts of yourself you can’t stand. I’d stand in the shadows of your heart and tell you I’m not afraid of your dark.”
10. “You are a mystery I promise I will never try to solve.”
11. “How many wars will it take us to learn that only the dead return?”
12. “And if there’s one thing in this world I’ve ever known for sure, it’s that this girl is gonna crush me like a small bug, leave me so fucking broken there’ll be body bags beneath my eyes from nights I cried so hard the stars died. But I’m like, go ahead. I’m all yours. I would kiss you in the middle of the ocean during a lightning storm, cause I’d rather be left for dead than left to wonder what thunder sounds like.”
13. “I can guarantee a haircut will never tell you anything about someone’s gender, who they love, or how they fuck.”
14. “This is for the times you went through hell so someone else wouldn’t have to.”
15. “I know you think this world is too dark to even dream in color,
but I’ve seen flowers bloom at midnight.
I’ve seen kites fly in gray skies
and they were real close to looking like the sunrise,
and sometime it takes the most wounded wings
the most broken things
to notice how strong the breeze is,
how precious the flight.”
“Everything but "I LOVE YOU" is small talk.”
16. “I have never met a heavy heart that wasn’t a phone booth with a red cape inside
Some people will never understand the kind of superpower it takes for some people to just walk outside
Some days I know my smile looks like the gutter of a falling house
But my hands are always holding tight to the ripchord of believing”
17. “Everything but “I LOVE YOU” is small talk.”
18. “She makes me feel like I could win the lottery with a parking ticket.”
19. “If you were to press your heart close up against somebody else’s heart eventually your hearts will start beating at the same time. And two little babies in an incubator, their hearts will beat at the same time. Love that. So if you have somebody in your life that is prone to anxiety, like myself, and if you happen to be a calm person, you could come up and hug me heart to heart and my heart hopefully would slow to yours. And I just love that idea. Or maybe yours would speed up to mine. But either way, we’ll be there together.”
20. “I wish for a heart you can see straight through, for a voice that glows in the dark, and a few really good friends to say, “That’s the way to go.”
21. “Picasso said he’d paint with his own wet tongue
on the dusty floor of a jail cell if he had to.
We have to create.
It is the only thing louder than destruction.
It’s the only chance the bard are gonna break,
our hands full of color
reaching towards the sky,
a brush stroke in the dark.
It is not too late.
That starry night
is not yet dry.”
22. “and feelings were always smarter things than thoughts”
23. “Lately I’ve been thinking about who I want to love, and how I want to love, and why I want to love the way I want to love, and what I need to learn to love that way, and how I need to become to become the kind of love I want to be. And when I break it all down, when I whittle it into a single breath, it essentially comes out like this: before I die, I want to be somebody’s favorite hiding place, the place they can put everything they need to survive, every secret, every solitude, every nervous prayer, and be absolutely certain I will keep it safe. I will keep it safe.”
“Commit to loving yourself completely. It's the most radical thing you will do in your lifetime.”
24. “When they ask why we stayed together for so long I say, I don’t know. I just know that we cried at the exact same time in every movie. I know we blushed everyday for the first two years. I know I always stole the covers and she never woke me up. I know the exact look on her face, the first night she used my toothbrush. The next day, I brushed my teeth like thirty-some times, ‘cause I didn’t want to let her go. You have to understand when it hurt to love her, it hurt the way the light hurts your eyes in the middle of the night, but I had to see, even through the ruin, if what we were burying were seeds. There were so many plants in our house, you could rake the leaves even through that winter when I was trying to make angels in the snow of her cold shoulder. She was still leaving love notes in my suitcase; I’d always find them.”
25. “Someday we will dare
to trade good for true”
26. “Commit to loving yourself completely. It’s the most radical thing you will do in your lifetime.”
27. “It’s turning the thunder into grace,
knowing sometimes the break in your heart
is like the hole in the flute.
Sometimes it’s the place
where the music comes through.”
28. “It’s okay. Everybody’s survival looks a little bit like death sometimes.”
29. “I am whoever I am when I am it.”
30. “When your heart is broken you plant seeds in the cracks
and you pray for rain.
And you teach your sons and daughters
there are sharks in the water
but the only way to survive
is to breathe deep
and dive.”
“Just to be clear I don't want to get out without a broken heart. I intend to leave this life so shattered there's gonna have to be a thousand separate heavens for all of my flying parts.”
31. “You keep worrying you’re taking up too much space. I wish you’d let yourself be the milky way.”
32. “Something difficult to stomach in this life is the fact that we might all learn and grow at a pace that will hurt people”
33. “Just to be clear I don’t want to get out without a broken heart. I indend to leave this life so shattered there’s gonna have to be a thousand separate heavens for all of my flying parts.”
34. “When the truth isn’t hopeful, the telling of it is.”
35. “What I know about living is that the pain is never just ours. Every time I hurt I know the wound is an echo, so I keep listening for the moment the grief becomes a window, when I can see what I couldn’t see before.”
36. “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.”
37. “This life is built almost entirely of love and losing, isn’t it?”
38. “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’.”
“forests may be gorgeous
but there’s nothing more alive
than a tree that grows in a cemetery”
39. “There is no weapon more dangerous than a wound, and being wounded there are things we have all done that we would almost would rather die that face into, but no one heals what they refuse to look at. So when asked if I believe in “good people”, I say I believe in people who are committed to knowing their own wounds intimately. People who read their wound’s diaries, who follow their wounds out windows, down ladders asking “Where are you going? What do you need? How can I intervene before a cruel thing is done or said?”
40. “and I’m not the type to want to celebrate forever
when Right Now is forever walking down the aisle unnoticed.”
41. “forests may be gorgeous
but there’s nothing more alive
than a tree that grows in a cemetery”
42. “Don’t think so much, you’re gonna suffocate your feelings”
43. “This kind of love has to be verb.”
44. “I know there are things I haven’t survived
I know there are people in this world who have had to work really hard to survive me,
I don’t ever want to take that lightly
But I want the heavy to anchor me brave, to anchor me loving, to anchor me in something that will absolutely hold me to my word
When I tell Cupid I intend to keep walking out to the tip of his arrow,
to bend it back towards myself,
to aim for my goodness; ’til the muscle in my chest tears from the stretch of becoming.”
Those are my 44 favorite Andrea Gibson quotes.
Andrea Gibson does a better job or writing about hurt and love than most writers I’ve come across. In her writing she doesn’t shy away from the pain she’s felt or how its impacted her life. Instead of hiding from it she uses it to create beautiful poetry and help the rest of us know we aren’t alone in what we may be going through.
Which Andrea Gibson quote is your favorite?
Do you have any favorite Andrea Gibson quotes I missed? If so, feel free to leave them in the comment section below!
Stay Gold.
Todd
Now every time I hear the word love I think going, going,
The first week you were gone,
I kept seeing your hand wave goodbye
Like a windshield wiper in a flooding car
In the last real moment I believed the hurricane would let me out alive.
Number 8 and 41 on your list are duplicates.
I can’t pick a favorite Andrea Gibson quote, but one I like a lot is:
“I cry as often as most people pee.”