Quote Of The Day By Ada Limón: 'We've Come This Far, Survived This Much. What Would Happen If...'

Ada Limón is one of the most impressive and profound poets of our time. Limón was born in 1976 in Sonoma, California. She went on to attend the New York University Creative Writing Program where she earned her MFA. Just four years later, she received the Autumn House Poetry Prize for "Lucky Wreck," her first-ever collection of poetry. Over the following decades, she released several poetry books and anthologies that earned many honors, including the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pearl Poetry Prize, a MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship, a spot as a Time magazine woman of the year, and more. In 2022, she became the United States poet laureate and the first-ever Hispanic American woman to have the role. She received the honor again the following year.

In 2010, Limón's stepmother died at just 51 years old. The shock this caused prompted Limón to leave her job in marketing to fully commit to her poetry. This resulted in incredible success, and Limón's work went on to revolve around themes of life, death, and aging. That's why Limón's view about being a human is today's quote of the day.

Ada Limón once wrote, "Look, we are not unspectacular things. / We've come this far, survived this much. What / would happen if we decided to survive more? To love harder?" This is a line from "Dead Stars," a poem featured in Limón's award-winning 2018 poetry collection, "The Carrying." This quote reminds us that we are all spectacular, and we can overcome and improve just like we have before.

Life isn't easy for anyone, and it has a way of beating us down over time. It's often difficult to remember how amazing we are as humans and how much we've overcome in our lives. Rather than simply accepting the tedium of everyday life and being crushed by pain and fear, we should remember how much we are truly capable of.

Ada Limón was far from the first person to let their passion take a backseat to the things our society forces us to spend our time doing. In fact, most of us do this in one way or another. Yet, remembering how fragile life is and how impressive we all are for having persevered through our struggles reminds us to focus on what really matters and fight against a system that tells us otherwise, just as Limón did. Rather than losing yourself to monotony, disconnecting from the world around you, giving up in favor of the systems that have been set up for you, and accepting a life that was laid out for you by others, we can remember that we are meant for more. In "Dead Stars," Limón reminds us that we are as spectacular as constellations. As she says, we aren't simply forgetting to observe the stars; "But mostly we're forgetting we're dead stars too ... "

• "I move in this house with you, the way I move / in my mind, unencumbered by beauty's cage."
• "This life is a fist / of fast wishes caught by nothing / but the fishhook of tomorrow's tug."
• "Will you tell us the stories that make / us uncomfortable, but not complicit?"
• "Poetry is a place where both grief and grace can live, where rage can be explored and examined, not simply exploited ... "
• "Perhaps we are always hurtling our body towards / the thing that will obliterate us, begging for love / from the speeding passage of time, and so maybe, / like the dog obedient at my heels, we can walk together / peacefully, at least until the next truck comes."