Brian D Ambrosio Quotes

“Charisma is a word that erodes stale on the page. When compared with the tangible, flesh experience it tries to label, it falls short. The only way to understand it, is to meet it.”
― Brian D'Ambrosio, Fresh Oil and Loose Gravel: Road Poetry by Brian D'Ambrosio 1998-2008

“The lonely, wistful revisionism of memories is as gratingly repetitive as snow and ice in Canada. I avoid them both at all costs - memories and Canada.”
― Brian D'Ambrosio

“Endings are thus formally unappealing to me, more than beginning or ending, in life, I enjoy continuing. Continuing is my only focus or concern.”
― Brian D'Ambrosio

“A pickup truck is a fragile ego overcompensated”
― Brian D'Ambrosio, Sentiment and Sediment: 21 Poems

“Trying to change someone only makes them cling to their existing behavior with brutish, primal force.”
― Brian D'Ambrosio, Fresh Oil and Loose Gravel: Road Poetry by Brian D'Ambrosio 1998-2008

“Boxing is beautiful brutality, and the devil is in the duality. Boxing is a tug of war and you recognize the antithetical feelings that are pulling you from the other end.”
― Brian D'Ambrosio

“Time
concocted by caffeine
unnervingly familiar
a ferociousness that sucks you in
even as it wears you down”
― Brian D'Ambrosio

“After you have seasoned your gloves with the blood, sweat and tears of your opponents, all else is anticlimactic.”
― Brian D'Ambrosio, Life in the Trenches

“The heart can be anguished
arrogant
even silly
milling about comically
rejecting fake decorum
it comes from a repressive family
that disapproves of its child’s chosen profession”
― Brian D'Ambrosio

“Simplicity matters. Especially when it comes to the muscle memory of boxing. That is perhaps rule number one. Simplicity works. Simplicity is repetition. Repetition is function. Boil function down to one action, maybe two. Left or right. Simplicity. Simplicity is really the hardest thing.”
― Brian D'Ambrosio, Rasta in the Ring: The Life of Rastafarian Boxer Livingstone Bramble

“Creativity is always a leap of faith. Writers sit down in front of empty pages. Painters stare before blank easels. Thespians rehearse looking toward empty stages. Creativity is experimental by nature.”
― Brian D'Ambrosio, From Haikus to Hatmaking: One Year in the Life of Western Montana

“Short lives,

bouncing harmlessly as a cloth doll on grandma’s lap.

Small helpless states,

pretentiousness garbed in the unintelligible,

makers of disposable art,

the zeal to make a scoop unstoppable,

pacified by fresh news,

of scrabbling sexy movements.”
― Brian D'Ambrosio

“Needless to say, I personally don’t believe fighting should be banned. I don't understand why a relatively small segment of the hockey world feels obligated to ban extracurricular combat when it's so popular elsewhere in American sports. Additionally, the league shouldn’t be trying to ban fighting to save the enforcers from hurting themselves. Fighters realize the risks associated with what they do, and they are bound to accept these risks.”
― Brian D'Ambrosio, Warriors on the Ice: Hockey's Toughest Talk

“For a man to get married and stay married, he must detach from and disavow the three things that bind him to reality: sex, travel, and near-death experiences.”
― Brian D'Ambrosio

“In these shallow arroyos
and grease-covered hills,
blowing dust zones,
the Christmas spirit of cotton bales,
fried in butter
and sweeping heat,
life,
spaciously allotted.
Catching our breath,
smiling in silence,
with the lowering sun in our faces.”
― Brian D'Ambrosio, Fresh Oil and Loose Gravel: Road Poetry by Brian D'Ambrosio 1998-2008

“Her moral obligation
to keep our hearts entwined.
Her preeminent love,
smelling like life,
in a good way,
familiar like an ancient woodcut,
a private postcard in the midst of a crowd,
in an old T-shirt to soak up the memories,
committed to recycling life.

repairing the nucleus.”
― Brian D'Ambrosio, Fresh Oil and Loose Gravel: Road Poetry by Brian D'Ambrosio 1998-2008

“The heart is only grain and goats
and the price of health
it cleans it rifles
smokes its herbs
breaks out a beer bottle or two
its precious radios
strapped up for protection
with ragged black tape”
― Brian D'Ambrosio, Halcyon Days and Stormy Months: 21 Poems

“On the perfect night there is nothing more transcendent or terrifying than boxing. It's the ultimate representation of the guilty pleasure.”
― Brian D'Ambrosio, Life in the Trenches

“Manassa naught,
a padded white envelope
with no return address,
landlocked and antiseptic,
exploited like a gas station.
Beauty
passes through in the briefest of cameos.”
― Brian D'Ambrosio, Fresh Oil and Loose Gravel: Road Poetry by Brian D'Ambrosio 1998-2008

“Her moral obligation
to keep our hearts entwined.
Her preeminent love,
smelling like life,
in a good way,
familiar like an ancient woodcut,
a private postcard in the midst of a crowd,
in an old T-shirt to soak up the memories,
committed to recycling life,
repairing the nucleus.”
― Brian D'Ambrosio

“Old and cold. High rates of suicide and prescription drug abuse. Look at the inbred faces at the grocery stores and coffee shops, the exercise-deficient kids, the routinized state workers, the sun-deprived adults and isolated third and fourth generation sad cases who've never experienced a meal outside of Lewis and Clark County. Make no mistake; Helena, Montana is old and cold and the rigid, sick antithesis of living.”
― Brian D'Ambrosio, Fresh Oil and Loose Gravel: Road Poetry by Brian D'Ambrosio 1998-2008

“But ours is all life
geranium plants in sunny windows
tucked alongside banks of the Rio Pueblo
capturing the light
and staying healthy
physical attraction of two acrobats”
― Brian D'Ambrosio, Sentiment and Sediment: 21 Poems