Ellen Bass Quotes That Will Inspire You to Live Your Best Life

1. Gate C22 At gate C22 in the Portland airport a man in a broad-band leather hat kissed a woman arriving from Orange County. They kissed and kissed and kissed. Long after the other passengers clicked the handles of their carry-ons and wheeled briskly toward short-term parking, the couple stood there, arms wrapped around each other like he’d just staggered off the boat at Ellis Island, like she’d been released at last from ICU, snapped out of a coma, survived bone cancer, made it down from Annapurna in only the clothes she was wearing.Neither of them was young. His beard was gray. She carried a few extra pounds you could imagine her saying she had to lose. But they kissed lavish kisses like the ocean in the early morning, the way it gathers and swells, sucking each rock under, swallowing it again and again. We were all watching–passengers waiting for the delayed flight to San Jose, the stewardesses, the pilots, the aproned woman icing Cinnabons, the man selling sunglasses. We couldn’t look away. We could taste the kisses crushed in our mouths.But the best part was his face. When he drew back and looked at her, his smile soft with wonder, almost as though he were a mother still open from giving birth, as your mother must have looked at you, no matter what happened after–if she beat you or left you or you’re lonely now–you once lay there, the vernix not yet wiped off, and someone gazed at you as if you were the first sunrise seen from the Earth. The whole wing of the airport hushed, all of us trying to slip into that woman’s middle-aged body, her plaid Bermuda shorts, sleeveless blouse, glasses, little gold hoop earrings, tilting our heads up. The Human Line

2. to love life, to love it evenwhen you have no stomach for itand everything you've held dearcrumbles like burnt paper in your hands,your throat filled with the silt of it.When grief sits with you, its tropical heatthickening the air, heavy as watermore fit for gills than lungs;when grief weights you like your own fleshonly more of it, an obesity of grief,you think, How can a body withstand this?Then you hold life like a facebetween your palms, a plain face,no charming smile, no violet eyes,and you say, yes, I will take youI will love you, again.

3. to love life, to love it evenwhen you have no stomach for itand everything you've held dearcrumbles like burnt paper in your hands,your throat filled with the silt of it.When grief sits with you, its tropical heatthickening the air, heavy as watermore fit for gills than lungs;when grief weights you like your own fleshonly more of it, an obesity of grief,you think, How can a body withstand this?Then you hold life like a facebetween your palms, a plain face,no charming smile, no violet eyes,and you say, yes, I will take youI will love you, again.

4. When You ReturnFallen leaves will climb back into trees.Shards of the shattered vase will riseand reassemble on the table.Plastic raincoats will refoldinto their flat envelopes. The egg,bald yolk and its transparent halo,slide back in the thin, calcium shell.Curses will pour back into mouths,letters un-write themselves, wordssiphoned up into the pen. My gray hairwill darken and become the feathersof a black swan. Bullets will snapback into their chambers, the powdertamped tight in brass casings. Borderswill disappear from maps. Rustrevert to oxygen and time. The firereturn to the log, the log to the tree,the white root curled upin the un-split seed. Birdsong will flyinto the lark’s lungs, answersbecome questions again.When you return, sweaters will unraveland wool grow on the sheep.Rock will go home to mountain, goldto vein. Wine crushed into the grape,oil pressed into the olive. Silk reeled into the spider’s belly. Night mothstucked close into cocoons, ink drainedfrom the indigo tattoo. Diamondswill be returned to coal, coalto rotting ferns, rain to clouds, lightto stars sucked back and backinto one timeless point, the way it wasbefore the world was born,that fresh, that whole, nothingbroken, nothing torn apart. Like a Beggar