“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 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.)
“The books are the best of me. The books are where you will find me.”
– Jeanette Winterson
“Some of the world saw our struggles, and all our beauty and pain and laughter and wit and artistry and anger and hurt and endless cascades of love — and they decided to hate us more.”
“When death is dragged into a relationship, maybe it never leaves.”
– Hazel Jane Plante
“Sometimes when you create art about painful things, she said, it can be cathartic. But sometimes it can just bring you back to the pain you’re trying to turn into art.”
– Hazel Jane Plante
“Feeling real is more than existing; it is finding a way to exist as oneself, and to relate to objects as oneself, and to have a self into which to retreat for relaxation.”
– D. W. Winnicott
“It happens to be a fact that nearly every writer of fiction in the world drinks more whisky than is good for him. He does it to give himself faith, hope and courage. A person is a fool to become a writer.”
– Roald Dahl
“All sorts of things happen and they wither. This is the myriad deaths you have died. But if someone is there, someone who can give you back what has happened, then the details dealt with in this way become part of you, and do not die.”
– D. W. Winnicott
“Life is short but it can be long while it lasts.”
– August Strindberg