Quote_tiny Molly's quotes

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  • Patrick McCabe
    "You'll have to learn to forgive," he said. "For if you don't, you know what will happen?"
    "What, Doctor?" I croaked, for my outburst had exhausted me.
    "It will destroy you," he said as he handed me the tea.
    A tear came into my eye when he said it for I knew it was true and I would have loved to be able to do it (not because of its destroying me but because it was right, and deep down I knew that) but I couldn't and the more I thought of it the more the blood came coursing to my head so that whenever I'd write I'd find myself clutching the pencil so tight I broke the lead how many times I don't know, hundreds."
    Patrick McCabe (Breakfast on Pluto)


  • Denise Duhamel
    "Language Police Report
    After Diane Ravitch's The Language Police

    The busybody (banned as sexist, demeaning to older women) who lives next door called my daughter a tomboy (banned as sexist) when she climbed the jungle (banned; replaced with "rain forest") gym. Then she had the nerve to call her an egghead and a bookworm (both banned as offensive; replaced with "intellectual") because she read fairy (banned because suggests homosexuality; replace with "elf") tales.

    I'm tired of the Language Police turning a deaf ear (banned as handicapism) to my complaints. I'm no Pollyanna (banned as sexist) and will not accept any lame (banned as offensive; replace with "walks with a cane") excuses at this time.

    If Alanis Morrissette can play God (banned) in Dogma (banned as ethnocentric; replace with "Doctrine" or "Belief"), why can't my daughter play stickball (banned as regional or ethnic bias) on boy's night out (banned as sexist)? Why can't she build a snowman (banned, replace with "snow person") without that fanatic (banned as ethnocentric; replace with "believer," "follower," or "adherent") next door telling her she's going to hell (banned; replaced with "heck" or "darn")?

    Do you really think this is what the Founding Fathers (banned as sexist; replace with "the Founders" or "the Framers") had in mind? That we can't even enjoy our Devil (banned)-ed ham sandwiches in peace? I say put a stop to this cult (banned as ethnocentric) of PC old wives' tales (banned as sexist; replace with "folk wisdom") and extremist (banned as ethnocentric; replace with "believer," "follower," or "adherent") conservative duffers (banned as demeaning to older men).

    As an heiress (banned as sexist; replace with "heir") to the first amendment, I feel that only a heretic (use with caution when comparing religions) would try to stop American vernacular from flourishing in all its inspirational (banned as patronizing when referring to a person with disabilities) splendor."
    Denise Duhamel


  • Alice McDermott
    "I suppose I've never set out to write a novel in which nothing happens . . . only to write a novel about the lives of certain characters. That nothing 'happens' in their lives is beside the point to me; I'm still interested in how they live, and think, and speak, and make some sense of their own experience. Incident (in novels and in life) is momentary, and temporary, but the memory of an incident, the story told about it, the meaning it takes on or loses over time, is lifelong and fluid, and that's what interests me and what I hope will prove interesting to readers. We're deluged with stories of things that have happened, events, circumstances, actions, etc. We need some stories that reveal how we think and feel and hope and dream. "
    Alice McDermott


  • "Writing about sex is not as personally revealing as one might think, because like anything else you write about, the words are not the deed. I have not done those words, I have done and felt private things for which words such as "sex" and "lust" are only poor apologies."
    Doreen Baingana


  • Samuel Beckett
    "Memories are killing. So you must not think of certain things, of those that are dear to you, or rather you must think of them, for if you don’t there is the danger of finding them, in your mind, little by little."
    Samuel Beckett


  • Neil Gaiman
    "There are a hundred things she has tried to chase away the things she won't remember and that she can't even let herself think about because that's when the birds scream and the worms crawl and somewhere in her mind it's always raining a slow and endless drizzle.

    You will hear that she has left the country, that there was a gift she wanted you to have, but it is lost before it reaches you. Late one night the telephone will sign, and a voice that might be hers will say something that you cannot interpret before the connection crackles and is broken.

    Several years later, from a taxi, you will see someone in a doorway who looks like her, but she will be gone by the time you persuade the driver to stop. You will never see her again.

    Whenever it rains you will think of her. "
    Neil Gaiman


  • "There are indeed many wonders, and with regard to the stories people tell one another, it may be that such tales go beyond the true account and, embellished with iridescent lies, beguile them."
    Pindar


  • Jonathan Lethem
    "Every room I've lived in since I was given my own room at eleven was lined with, and usually overfull of, books. My employment in bookstores was always continuous with my private hours: shelving and alphabetizing, building shelves, and browsing-- in my collection and others-- in order to understand a small amount about the widest possible number of books. Such numbers of books are constantly acquired that constant culling is necessary; if I slouch in this discipline, the books erupt. I've also bricked myself in with music--vinyl records, then compact discs. My homes have been improbably information-dense, like capsules for survival of a nuclear war, or models of the interior of my own skull. That comparison--room as brain-- is one I've often reached for in describing the rooms of others, but it began with the suspicion that I'd externalized my own brain, for anyone who cared to look."
    Jonathan Lethem (The Disappointment Artist)


  • "Do not be concerned with the faults of other persons. Do not see others' faults with a hateful mind. There is an old saying that if you stop seeing others' faults, then naturally seniors and venerated and juniors are revered Do not imitate others' faults; just cultivate virtue. Buddha prohibited unwholesome actions, but did not tell us to hate those who practice unwholesome actions."
    Zen Master Dogen


  • J.D. Salinger
    "I am a kind of paranoiac in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy"
    J.D. Salinger


  • Cormac McCarthy
    "The small wad of burning paper drew down to a wisp of flame and then died out leaving a faint pattern for just a moment in the incandescence like the shape of a flower, a molten rose. Then all was dark again."
    Cormac McCarthy (The Road)


  • Cormac McCarthy
    "He thought each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins. As in a party game. Say the words and pass it on. So be sparing. What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not."
    Cormac McCarthy (The Road)


  • "Consider A Move

    The steady time of being unknown,
    in solitude, without friends,
    is not a steadiness that sustains.
    I hear your voice waver on the phone:

    Haven't talked to anyone for days.
    I drive around. I sit in parking lots.

    The voice zeroes through my ear, and waits.
    What should I say? There are ways

    to meet people you will want to love?
    I know of none. You come out stronger
    having gone through this? I no longer
    believe that, if I once did. Consider a move,

    a change, a job, a new place to live,
    someplace you'd like to be. That's not it,
    you say. Now time turns back. We almost touch.
    Then what is? I ask. What is?"
    Michael Ryan (New and Selected Poems)


  • Thomas Pynchon
    "Such a captive maiden, having plenty of time to think, soon realizes that her tower, its height and architecture, are like her ego only incidental: that what really keeps her where she is is magic, anonymous and malignant, visited on her from outside and for no reason at all. Having no apparatus except gut fear and female cunning to examine this formless magic, to understand how it works, how to measure its field strength, count its lines of force, she may fall back on superstition, or take up a useful hobby like embroidery, or go mad, or marry a disk jockey. If the tower is everywhere and the knight of deliverance no proof against its magic, what else?"
    Thomas Pynchon (The Crying of Lot 49)


  • Ana Castillo
    "Catch me, as if I have surely been out committing a violation against you, my sin of insisting on existing without you. "
    Ana Castillo (Loverboys: Stories)


  • Samuel Beckett
    "there is [...]
    a last even of last times of saying
    if you do not love me I shall not be loved
    if I do not love you I shall not love"
    Samuel Beckett (Cascando and Other Short Dramatic Pieces)


  • Meredith Hall
    "I have lived this life, and no matter what others may decide about it, I must claim each decision as mine. I have caused harm, failed in the expectations and obligations of love. I have loved well. What I do each day is carried within me until I die. "
    Meredith Hall (Without a Map: A Memoir)


  • "Sometimes we do that to ourselves -- we pit our desires against one another. We insist unnecessarily on seeing one aspect of our personality as being at odds with the rest of ourselves. "
    Julia Serano


  • Peter S. Beagle
    "I love whom I love," Prince Lir repeated firmly. "You have no power over anything that matters."
    Peter S. Beagle (The Last Unicorn)


  • Peter S. Beagle
    "My lady... I am a hero. It is a trade, no more, like weaving or brewing, and like them is has its own tricks and knacks and small arts. There are ways of perceiving witches, and of knowing poison streams; there are certain weak spots that all dragons have, and certain riddles that hooded strangers tend to set you. But the true secret of being a hero lies in knowing the order of things. The swineherd cannot already be wed to the princess when he embarks on his adventures, nor can the boy knock at the witch's door when she is away on vacation. The wicked uncle cannot be found out and foiled before he has done something wicked. Things must happen when it is time for them to happen. Quests may not simply be abandoned; prophecies may not be left to rot like unpicked fruit; unicorns may go unrescued for a long time, but not forever. The happy ending cannot come in the middle of the story... Heroes... Heroes know about order, and happy endings -- heroes know that some things are better than others... You were the one who taught me... I never looked at you without seeing the sweetness of the way the world goes together, or without sorrow for its spoiling. I became a hero to serve you, and all that is like you."
    Peter S. Beagle (The Last Unicorn)


  • Peter S. Beagle
    "Real magic can never be made by offering someone else's liver. You must tear out your own, and not expect to get it back."
    Peter S. Beagle (The Last Unicorn)


  • "Should he give free reign to his desires, the bibliomaniac can ruin his life along with the lives of his loved ones. He'll often take better care of his books than of his own health; he'll spend more on fiction than he does on food; he'll be more interested in his library than in his relationships, and, since few people are prepared to live in a place where every available surface is covered with piles of books, he'll often find himself alone, perhaps in the company of a neglected and malnourished at. When he dies, all but forgotten, his body might fester for days before a curious neighbor grows concerned about the smell."
    Mikita Brottman (The Solitary Vice: Against Reading)


  • "I've had more difficulty accepting myself as bisexual than I ever did accepting that I was a lesbian. It felt traitorous. A few years ago, I admitted to myself that I was still interested in men in more than a "Brad Pitt is slick hot sexy" kind of way. But I worried whatmy friends, exes, and the Community would think. I never even broached the subject with my parents. Because what bothered me the most was that people would think that being a lesbian had been a phase for me, when that was so very not the case. What I feared was that I would no longer be part of a community, that I might be seen with my boyfriend and not be recognized as something not the same. "
    R. Gay (First Person Queer: Who We Are)


  • Franz Kafka
    "Altogether, I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn't shake us awake like a blow to the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it? Good God, we'd be just as happy if we had no books at all; books that make us happy we could, in a pinch, write ourselves. What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far away from any human presence, like a suicide.

    A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us. That is what I believe."
    Franz Kafka


  • May Sarton
    "Does anything in nature despair except man? An animal with a foot caught in a trap does not seem to despair. It is too busy trying to survive. It is a ll closed in, to a kind of still, intense waiting. Is this a key? Keep busy with survival. Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember that nothing stays the same for long, not even pain, psychic pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass. Let it go. "
    May Sarton (Journal of a Solitude)


  • May Sarton
    "If art is not to be life-enhancing, what is it to be? Half the world is feminine--why is there resentment at a female-oriented art? Nobody asks The Tale of Genji to be masculine! Women certainly learn a lot from books oriented toward a masculine world. Why is not the reverse also true? Or are men really so afraid of women's creativity (because they are not themselves at the center of creation, cannot bear children) that a woman writer of genius evokes murderous rage, must be brushed aside with a sneer as 'irrelevant'?"
    May Sarton (Journal of a Solitude)


  • May Sarton
    "One has only to set a loved human being against the fact that we are all in peril all the time to get back a sense of proportion. What does anything matter compared to the reality of love and its span, so brief at best, maintained against such odds?"
    May Sarton (Journal of a Solitude)


  • "She goes where she pleases. She appears unhoped for, uncalled for. She moves through doors and walls and windows. Her thoughts move through minds. She enters dreams. She vanishes and is still there. She knows the future and sees through flesh. She is not afraid of anything."
    Rachel Klein (The Moth Diaries)


  • ".. the truth is what you can't see but are certain of anyway."
    Rachel Klein (The Moth Diaries)


  • "You have to trust someone before you can have rituals with them."
    Rachel Klein (The Moth Diaries)


  • "WHAT IT IS

    It is what
    it is. But
    what is it?

    What it is—

    Some soft
    tautology

    whose terms
    are touch

    Time to give, time
    to give it up. "
    Maggie Nelson (Something Bright, Then Holes)


  • Ana Castillo
    "Women Are Not Roses

    Women have no
    beginning
    only continual
    flows.

    Though rivers flow
    women are not
    rivers.

    Women are not
    roses
    they are not oceans
    or stars.

    i would like to tell
    her this but
    i think she
    already knows."
    Ana Castillo (Women Are Not Roses)


  • "The Lesson You've Got

    to learn is the someday you'll someday
    stagger to, blinking in cold light, all tears
    shed, ready to poke your bovine head
    in the yoke they've shaped.

    Everyone learns this. Born, everyone
    breathes, pays tax, plants dead
    and hurts galore. There's grief enough
    for each. My mother

    learned by moving man to man,
    outlived them all. The parched earth's
    bare (once she leaves it) of any who watched
    the instants I trod it.

    Other than myself, of course.
    I've made a study of bearing
    and forbearance. Everyone does,
    it turns out, and note

    those faces passing by: Not one's a god. "
    Mary Karr (Sinners Welcome: Poems)


  • "At the Sound of the Gunshot,
    Leave A Message

    That's what my friend spoke
    into his grim machine the winter he first went mad
    as we both did in our thirties with still
    no hope of revenue, gravely inking
    our poems on pages held fast by gyres
    the color of lead.

    Godless, our minds
    did monster us, left us bobbing as in a swamp
    until we sank. His eyes were burn holes
    in a swollen face. His breath was a venom
    he drank deep of. He called his own tongue
    a scar, this poet

    who can crowbar open
    the most sealed heart, make ash flower,
    and the cocked shotgun's double-zero mouths
    (whose pellets had exploded star holes into plaster and porcelain
    and not a few locked doors) never touched
    my friend's throat. Praise

    Him, whose earth is green.

    (for Franz Wright)"
    Mary Karr (Sinners Welcome: Poems)


  • "In my godless household, poems were the closest we came to sacred speech -- the only prayers said."
    Mary Karr (Sinners Welcome: Poems)


  • Alan Moore
    "In order to be able to make it, you have to put aside the fear of failing and the desire of succeeding. You have to do these things completely and purely without fear, without desire. Because things that we do without lust of result are the purest actions we shall ever take."
    Alan Moore


  • Alan Moore
    "Much of magic as I understand it in the Western occult tradition is the search for the Self, with a capital S. This is understood as being the Great Work, as being the gold the alchemists sought, as being the Will, the Soul, the thing we have inside us that is behind the intellect, the body, the dreams. The inner dynamo of us, if you like. Now this is the single most important thing that we can ever attain, the knowledge of our own Self. And yet there are a frightening amount of people who seem to have the urge not just to ignore the Self, but actually seem to have the urge to obliterate themselves. This is horrific, but you can almost understand the desire to simply wipe out that awareness, because it’s too much of a responsibility to actually posses such a thing as a soul, such a precious thing. What if you break it? What if you lose it? Mightn’t it be best to anesthetize it, to deaden it, to destroy it, to not have to live with the pain of struggling towards it and trying to keep it pure? I think that the way that people immerse themselves in alcohol, in drugs, in television, in any of the addictions that our culture throws up, can be seen as a deliberate attempt to destroy any connection between themselves and the responsibility of accepting and owning a higher Self and then having to maintain it."
    Alan Moore


  • Alan Moore
    "Now everything is wonderful and hazardous and nothing's hypothetical."
    Alan Moore


  • "The Old Man at the Wheel

    Measured against the immeasurable
    universe, no word you have spoken

    brought light. Brought
    light to what, as a child, you thought

    too dark to be survived. By exorcism
    you survived. By submission, then making.


    You let all the parts of that thing you would
    cut out of you enter your poem because

    enacting there all its parts allowed you
    the illusion you could cut it from your soul.

    Dilemmas of choice given what cannot
    change alone roused you to words.

    As you grip the things that were young when
    you were young, they crumble in your hand.

    Now you must drive west, which in November
    means driving directly into the sun."
    Frank Bidart (Watching the Spring Festival: Poems)


  • Mark Haddon
    "A Rough Guide

    Be polite at the reception desk.
    Not all the knives are in the museum.
    The waitresses know that a nice boy
    is formed in the same way as a deckchair.
    Pay for the beer and send flowers.
    Introduce yourself as Richard.
    Do not refer to what somebody did
    at a particular time in the past.
    Remember, every Friday we used to go
    for a walk. I walked. You walked.
    Everything in the past is irregular.
    This steak is very good. Sit down.
    There is no wine, but there is ice cream.
    Eat slowly. I have many matches. "
    Mark Haddon (The Talking Horse and the Sad Girl and the Village Under the Sea: Poems)


  • Mark Haddon
    "Miaow

    Consider me.
    I sit here like Tiberius,
    inscrutable and grand.
    I will let "I dare not"
    wait upon "I would"
    and bear the twangling
    of your small guitar
    because you are my owl
    and foster me with milk.
    Why wet my paw?
    Just keep me in a bag
    and no one knows the truth.
    I am familiar with witches
    and stand a better chance in hell than you
    for I can dance on hot bricks,
    leap your height
    and land on all fours.
    I am the servant of the Living God.
    I worship in my way.
    Look into these slit green stones
    and follow your reflected lights
    into the dark.

    Michel, Duc de Montaigne, knew.
    You don't play with me.
    I play with you."
    Mark Haddon (The Talking Horse and the Sad Girl and the Village Under the Sea: Poems)


  • Maggie O'Farrell
    "We are all, Esme decides, just vessels through which identities pass: we are lent features, gestures, habits, then we hand them on. Nothing is our own. We begin in the world as anagrams of our antecedents."
    Maggie O'Farrell (The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox)


  • "Wherever it left us,
    we were barely learning to live with it
    when here came Flannery O'Connor and Hank Williams
    to tell us that no one has ever been loved
    the way everybody wants to be loved,
    and that's hard. That's hard.

    --last stanza of How Step by Step We Have Come to Understand"
    Miller Williams (Time and the Tilting Earth: Poems)


  • "Separatio in Loco

    He lives all alone now, in the home they bought,
    and finally seems to be managing, more or less.
    Not the way he was, of course, with her,
    who lives alone now, too, at the same address."
    Miller Williams (Time and the Tilting Earth: Poems)


  • "A Poem Wants Me

    A poem wants me to write it. It rattles my door.
    I woke up at three with a sense there was something to say.
    I don't know what it wants to be about
    or why it came to me to have its way.

    Now it rattles a window. I see a hand.
    I see a spider web, a torn glove.
    I see a single shoe, a dead dog.
    I hear a woman talking about love.

    It rubs against the glass like a new idea
    trying to find shape, trying to stay.
    I still don't know where it came from, how it got here,
    or what it wants the shapes of my ink to say."
    Miller Williams (Time and the Tilting Earth: Poems)



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