“I would not be able to have said certain things if I had been under the obligation to unify the word and the deed. As it is I can let my words reach out and net impossible things—things that are impossible for me to do. And this is a way of paying the price for saying or seeing things.”
– Norman O. Brown
“He had no interest in the art of modernity, let alone contemporary works. But it would be inconceivable for him to consider that his unshakable belief in his own good taste was nothing more than a rigid wall protecting him from the chaos of life itself.”
– Ayşegül Savaş, White on White
“You start with the sentence and the sentence finds out where it is going and you go on from there.”
– Edwin Frank, Stranger than Fiction
I do not know what it is to feel rested anymore. I took a week off from work, to rest, and I do not understand what is happening to me. There is something reassuringly familiar to being wound tight. This, whatever it is, is all very strange.
“I believe in people who are nervous and whose hands shake a little.”
– Deborah Levy
“I had energy because I had no choice but to have energy. I had to write to support my children and I had to do all the heavy lifting. Freedom is never free. Anyone who has struggled to be free knows how much it costs.”
– Deborah Levy, The Cost of Living
The magnificent idiocy of desire. How it is so mewlingly stupid, how it is flush with such inexhaustible faith.
“You’re special and you’re also an idiot. That’s how it feels to be a writer. That’s how it feels to be an artist.”
“No, I was not trapped in the wrong body. I was trapped in the wrong universe. In order to become who I was, I had to break the world open.”
– Rachel Pollack
“No. I mean something much more basic. What I felt, what I desired was unspeakable because, for me at least, the words did not exist.”
– Rachel Pollack
“There are creatures in the walls. We hear them scurry and scratch, gnaw on the insulation, tangle the wiring. At night they write poems on tiny typewriters about how they hear creatures outside the walls.”
– Stuart Ross, The Sky is a Sky in the Sky
“I don’t know if I’m real when I’m not being touched”
– Natalie Wee, Beast at Every Threshold
“‘He is dying,’ I said. She came with me to the bed and saw that he was dead. She said as if in wonderment: ‘How quickly it has all passed.'”
– Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections
“But I know this creature. I know the precise frequency where art stops explaining itself and starts eating you alive.”
– Sophie, The Tumblr-like Allure of Bill Skarsgård
“I have just awakened to the glorious beauty of the day, and have a sense of indescribable well-being. I see the sun glittering through the leaves and blossoms of the bushes. Everything is wholly wonderful, colourful, and splendid.”
– Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections
(I am in the middle of revisiting Artaud. It happens, every now and then. His drunk and maddened brilliance is always calling me.)
“Masterpieces of the past are good for the past: they are not good for us. We have the right to say what has been said and even what has not been said in a way that belongs to us.”
– Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and its Double
“All true feeling is in reality untranslatable. To express it is to betray it. But to translate it is to dissimulate it. True expression hides what it makes manifest.”
– Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and its Double
“One can wonder, in other words, whether theatre has the power, not to define thoughts but to cause thinking, whether it may not entice the mind to take profound and efficacious attitudes toward it from its own point of view.”
– Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and its Double
“We are watching a mental alchemy which makes a gesture of a state of mind — the dry, naked, linear gesture all our acts could have if they sought the absolute.”
– Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and its Double
“If she reached out, her fingers, she felt, might brush against this person’s proud, moist soul.”
– Maru Ayase, The Forest Brims Over
“a little martyr, a poet trickster. I used to stare at flowers, rage at death, cry at sunsets.”
– Peter Milligan, Shade the Changing Man
“It must all be considered as if spoken by a character in a novel.”
– Roland Barthes
Starting to write a book is terrifying: how it is at this moment both unimaginably massive and not yet anything at all. It feels a bit too much like teetering at the edge of an abyss. And that is where I am at.
“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”
– Antonio Gramsci
(How it keeps becoming more and more true.)