Ross gay quotes
Nicknames, Fireflies And Reckless Air Quotes: Ross Gay Writes 'The Book Of Delights'
ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
On the afternoon he turned 42, the writer Ross Gay set himself a challenge. Every day for a year, he would write an essay about something delightful. He wrote about nicknames, fireflies, careless air quotes. And about a hundred of those essays are now calm in his brand-new book appropriately enough titled "The Guide Of Delights." When he came into our studios, Ross Gay told me that finding those delights turned out to be easier than he expected.
ROSS GAY: Well, one of the things that I realized is that in the beginning I thought - oh, man. I'm going to, like, contain to look around - like, be like really attentive.
SHAPIRO: Just scrounge for delights.
GAY: Yeah - scrounge for delights, yeah.
SHAPIRO: (Laughter).
GAY: And then, like, couple of weeks in - maybe a month or so in, I started to be, love, taking notebooks of like - that was delightful. That was delightful. That was delightful. That was - so like, accumulating all of these, you know? I acquire an essay called "Stacks Of Delights" (ph) or something like...
SHAPIRO: Right, where you're like...
(LAUGH
“Among the most beautiful things I've ever heard anyone say came from my student Bethany, talking about her pedagogical aspirations or ethos, how she wanted to be as a instructor, and what she wanted her classrooms to be: "What if we unified our wildernesses together?" Sit with that for a minute. That the body, the life, might carry a wilderness, an unexpected space, and that yours and mine might somewhere, somehow, convene . Might, even, link.
And what if the wilderness - perhaps the densest wild in there - thickets, bogs, swamps, uncrossable ravines and rivers (have I made the metaphor clear?) - is our sorrow? Or... the 'intolerable.' It astonishes me sometimes - no, often - how every person I get to comprehend - everyone, regardless of everything, by which I represent everything - lives with some profound personal sorrow... Everyone, regardless, always, of everything. Not to mention the existential sorrow we all might be afflicted with, which is that we, and what we treasure, will soon be annihilated. Which sounds more dramatic than it might. Grant me just express dead. Is this, sorrow, of which our impending existence no more might be the foundation, the great wilderness?
Is sorrow the tru RUMPUS BOOK CLUB EXCERPT: INCITING JOY BY ROSS GAY
An excerpt from The Rumpus Book Club‘s November selection,
Inciting Joy by Ross Gay
forthcoming from Algonquin Books on October 25, 2022
Subscribe by Octobet 15 to the Poetry Book Club to receive this title and an invitation to an exclusive conversation with the author via Crowdcast
Excerpt from Ross Gay’s INCITING JOY, pp. 1-10
I have had the good fortune in the past several years, since shortly after the publication of my third book of poems, Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, and probably again with my book of essays, The Book of Delights, to have had numerous and sustained conversations about joy. These conversations might begin during question-and-answer sessions, in interviews, or even in the book signing line. I’ll never forget a miss at a reading in a public library in April of 2016 in Claremont, California—one of those weird, beautifully ugly sixties California buildings; it was a rancher of a library, maybe with some faux stone on the front, maybe white brick—I suspect she was in her late sixties or early seventies. And as she asked me to inscribe Catalog, she was crying, just a little, not ver
Ross Gay > Quotes
Showing 1-30 of 98 “Because in trying to articulate what, perhaps, joy is, it has occurred to me that among other things—the trees and the mushrooms have shown me this—joy is the mostly invisible, the underground union between us, you and me, which is, among other things, the fantastic fact of our being and the lives of everyone and thing we love going away. If we sink a spoon into that fact, into the duff between us, we will find it teeming. It will observe like all the books ever written. It will look like all the nerves in a body. We might call it sorrow, but we might call it a union, one that, once we notice it, once we bring it into the light, might become plant and food. Might be joy.”
― Ross Gay, The Book of Delights: Essays
Like
“I think I could spend day theorizing how it is that people are not bad to each other, but that’s really not the point. The signal is that in almost every instance of our lives, our social lives, we are, if we pay attention, in the midst of an almost constant, if subtle, caretaking. Holding open doors. Offering elbows at crosswalks.
RUMPUS BOOK CLUB EXCERPT: INCITING JOY BY ROSS GAY
An excerpt from The Rumpus Book Club‘s November selection,
Inciting Joy by Ross Gay
forthcoming from Algonquin Books on October 25, 2022
Subscribe by Octobet 15 to the Poetry Book Club to receive this title and an invitation to an exclusive conversation with the author via Crowdcast
Excerpt from Ross Gay’s INCITING JOY, pp. 1-10
I have had the good fortune in the past several years, since shortly after the publication of my third book of poems, Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, and probably again with my book of essays, The Book of Delights, to have had numerous and sustained conversations about joy. These conversations might begin during question-and-answer sessions, in interviews, or even in the book signing line. I’ll never forget a miss at a reading in a public library in April of 2016 in Claremont, California—one of those weird, beautifully ugly sixties California buildings; it was a rancher of a library, maybe with some faux stone on the front, maybe white brick—I suspect she was in her late sixties or early seventies. And as she asked me to inscribe Catalog, she was crying, just a little, not ver
Ross Gay > Quotes
“Because in trying to articulate what, perhaps, joy is, it has occurred to me that among other things—the trees and the mushrooms have shown me this—joy is the mostly invisible, the underground union between us, you and me, which is, among other things, the fantastic fact of our being and the lives of everyone and thing we love going away. If we sink a spoon into that fact, into the duff between us, we will find it teeming. It will observe like all the books ever written. It will look like all the nerves in a body. We might call it sorrow, but we might call it a union, one that, once we notice it, once we bring it into the light, might become plant and food. Might be joy.”
― Ross Gay, The Book of Delights: Essays
Like
“I think I could spend day theorizing how it is that people are not bad to each other, but that’s really not the point. The signal is that in almost every instance of our lives, our social lives, we are, if we pay attention, in the midst of an almost constant, if subtle, caretaking. Holding open doors. Offering elbows at crosswalks.