Fanny Howe > Quotes

“Why does a heart wear its eyes
into hell
like slivers of false sunshine”
― Fanny Howe

“The wildness of the flower is all in the tone”
― Fanny Howe

“The ring comes whenever it will
because it's dark
where the mountains mother

and being stuck in one spot
is something to ring bells about”
― Fanny Howe

“There is no longer any class outside the class of character, and no history to put your faith in.
You can actually live as if you have no culture, no perspective particular to a date in time.
You are an individual whose prime and solitary property is your own body.
Dying becomes a hell beyond all reason or justice in this ahistorical context.”
― Fanny Howe, The Deep North

“We have often had this particular exchange about climate and landscape and why we both feel so lonely here uprooted. It was what each of us had wanted of course.

Besides wanting to experience a place we hated, we wanted to be insomniacs and loners, losers and drop-outs. To know the sky was the only location of meaning and joy left to us.”
― Fanny Howe, Indivisible

“I can't rescue what never happened
though I came here to do so.”
― Fanny Howe, Come and See

“Since love came over and knocked me down,
Then kicked me in the side and fled,
I have suffered from a prolonged perplexity.
God is the object of my wonder and the closest to me.
Especially near sleep. My sheets are like the wings of a guardian angel.
There is no other fabric so near to my feelings.”
― Fanny Howe, Come and See

“Philosophy should only be written as poetry.”
― Fanny Howe, Second Childhood: Poems

“According to a Kabbalistic rabbi, in the Messianic age people will no longer quarrel with others but only with themselves.”
― Fanny Howe, The Wedding Dress: Meditations on Word and Life

“Usually plot is to fiction what form is to poetry. It lifts and fills the rambling language and presses it down into a single shape and sound. (85)”
― Fanny Howe, The Wedding Dress: Meditations on Word and Life

“(Sometimes I think prostitution and slavery may be the actual subjects of all fiction because of the way fiction exploits its characters.)”
― Fanny Howe

“And after that loneliness will accompany you to
every airport, train station, bus depot, café, cinema,
and onto airplanes and into cars, strange rooms and
offices, classrooms and libraries, and it will hang near
your hand like a habit.
But it isn’t a habit and no one can see it.

It’s your obligation, and your companion warms itself
against you.
You are faithful to it because it was the only vow you
made finally, when it was unnecessary.

If you figured out why you chose it, years later, would
you ask it to go?
How would you replace it?”
― Fanny Howe

“The point of art is to show people that life is worth living by showing that it isn’t”
― Fanny Howe

“First you might cry. Because shame and loneliness are almost one. Shame at existing in the first place. Shame at being visible, taking up space, breathing some of the sky, sleeping in a whole bed, asking for a share. Loneliness feels so much like shame, it always seems to need a little more time on its own.”
― Fanny Howe

“A signal does not necessarily mean that you want to be located or described. It can mean that you want to be known as Unlocatable and Hidden.”
― Fanny Howe, Nod

“I was hungry for love

It was pathetic the stones
I threw or smashed my mouth on
in my pathology of starvation”
― Fanny Howe, Gone

“I traveled to the page where scripture meets fiction.
The paper slept but the night in me woke up.

Black letters were now alive
and collectible in a material crawl.

I could not decipher their intentions anymore.
To what end did their shapes come forth?

To seduce or speak truth?”
― Fanny Howe, Come and See

“A body's interior is a serpent studded with corruption.
From the will of each person-to secret egos-
she sees a net, dot-to-dot, interconnected, with persons
bent over it, laborious, intent, the whole world
working together on one collective project.

When your mouth remembers a bit of bread
left on a plate and leads you back to finish it,
you are having the experience-
close to the surface- by which you usually live.”
― Fanny Howe, One Crossed Out: Poems

“Walk to developmental old trombone- I -

seeking to be found-
inside time!- by one whose blues

seek by speaking tunes to
this specific city afternoon

of bread, fumes, and orange
nasturtiums- am, still, solo-

even the base of me being, unknown.”
― Fanny Howe, One Crossed Out: Poems

“Angels die?
It’s a frightening-miracle
because here they are.
The Upper God

has let them drop
like centuries into space.

And I recognize them!”
― Fanny Howe