Fred Chappell > Quotes

“Our thoughts were so awesome to us, that no one could speak a word, not even ‘Goodbye.’ We hugged and clasped and wept silently.”
― Fred Chappell, I Am One of You Forever

“No, I thank you; I have had an elegant sufficiency of the numerous delicacies. Any more would be an unsophisticated superfluity, for gastronomic satiety admonishes me that I have reached the ultimate stage of deglutition consistent with dietetic integrity. ”
― Fred Chappell, I Am One of You Forever

“The tear on my mother’s cheek got larger and larger. It detached from her face and became a shiny globe, widening outward like an inflating balloon. At first the tear floated in the air between them, but as it expanded it took my mother and father into itself. I saw them suspended, separate but beginning to slowly drift towards one another. Then my mother looked past my father’s shoulder, looked through the bright skin of the tear, at me. The tear enlarged until at last, it took me in, too. It was warm and salt. As soon as I got used to the strange light inside the tear, I began to swim clumsily towards my parents.”
― Fred Chappell, I Am One of You Forever

“There were too many things suddenly that I didn’t understand, and I didn’t know what to do about it. I knew that I needed to be older, but that’s not enough. You have to have some basic information that was not yet available to me.”
― Fred Chappell, I Am One of You Forever

“Shall the water not remember Ember
my hand’s slow gesture, tracing above of
its mirror my half-imaginary airy
portrait? My only belonging longing;
is my beauty, which I take ache
away and then return, as love of
teasing playfully the one being unbeing.
whose gratitude I treasure Is your
moves me. I live apart heart
from myself, yet cannot not
live apart. In the water’s tone, stone?
that brilliant silence, a flower Hour,
whispers my name with such slight light:
moment, it seems filament of air, fare
the world becomes cloudswell. well.”
― Fred Chappell

“Perhaps I had missed a great deal, reading so continually and seeing the world through the windowpanes of books. But then, maybe not. If books had made up a large part of the experience of my youth, it only meant that what I’d missed in immediacy of experience, I’d gained in variety, looking so widely into the thought…s and dreams of others, of travelers and sages, of soldiers and scholars and all the mighty dead.”
― Fred Chappell

“And wasn’t the power of money finally dependent upon the continued proliferation of product after product, dead objects produced without any thought given to their uses? Weren’t these mostly objects without any truly justifiable need? Didn’t the whole of American commercial culture exhibit this endless irrational productivity, clear analogue to sexual orgy? And yet productivity without regard to eventual need was, Peter maintained, actually unproductivity, it was really a kind of impotence.”
― Fred Chappell, Dagon

“In an almost totally insentient cosmos only human feeling is interesting or relevant to what the soul searches for...suffering is the most expensive of human emotions, but it is the most intense and precious of them, because suffering most efficiently humanizes the unfeeling universe.”
― Fred Chappell, Dagon

“Again he picked up a stone and kept rolling it in his hands. His hands were damp with mounting excitement. What was it that everyone in the world knew but he? There was something grave and black being kept from him, and he could feel how important it was, how imminent, and he was desperate to know.”
― Fred Chappell, Dagon

“The light was grainy, dusty; it looked like the Milky Way had spread from the top of the sky all down the west, and the tented shapes of the mountains were huge and satin black against it, and the ridgeline trees made a filigree of onyx. The wind had increased but not cooled; the promise of full summer was in it. And when Dr. Barcroft turned from the west to look again at the house, he was hardly surprised to see that it had begun to turn like a wheel upon a vertical axle as the silhouettes of the dancers raced past window after window. It was as if their dancing, the female slide and shuffle, the masculine drum and thunder, propelled the house behind them; it had become a merry-go-round, turning steadily and stately as the music went just a little bit faster, just a little more, and he could tell there were furies in it, whirlwinds and cyclones and hurricanes that Quigley's fiddle barely held in check, that his calling could barely control. ”
― Fred Chappell

“Every hour is another syllable in your epitaph.”
― Fred Chappell, Look Back All the Green Valley

“Wine still tastes for me of the mountaintop of piny woods with a warm spring dawn coming on, and that Spanishy word, Sonoma, is an exotic flavor all to itself.”
― Fred Chappel

“Multiplying my age by 2 in my head/I'm a grandfather. Or Dead.”
― Fred Chappell, River: A Poem

“On his back nothing was what it was, there were no demarcations, no outlines; nothing was formed, it was all in the process of becoming. Except here a large eye, marbled and fluid; there a crippled hand, the fingers webbed together with sperm. Scattered purple lumps which might be grapes, but pendent from nothing, not attached; knives which looked melting but still cruel; blue fernlike hair; smeared yellowish-white spots, which might be stars dripping down the soundless void, spots of startling silence on this raucous grating jungle, the polychrome verdure suggesting an impossible pointless fecundity and even the odor of this, but the whole impression transitory as dew. Here, was this an inky bird struggling into shape? Really, were these great fish? Or bared unjoined tendons? Was this a clot of spiny seaweed?…A worm?…And now lapping over his shoulder onto his chest, covering over the scars of Mina’s bites, these looked like green licks of flame, upside-down.”
― Fred Chappell, Dagon

“In the center of the sofa were two oblong companion pillows, shouldered so closely together that they looked like the Decalogue tablets. They were white, or had been white, and painfully stitched upon them with blue thread were companion mottoes, companion pictures. In the left pillow lies a girl, her long blue hair asprawl about her face, her eyes innocently shut, asleep. The motto: I SLEPT AND DREAMED THAT LIFE WAS BEAUTY. But the story continued, and on the next pillow her innocence is all torn away: there she stands, gripping a round broom; her hair now is pinned up severely and behind her sits a disheartening barrel churn. I WOKE AND FOUND THAT LIFE WAS DUTY. The pillows sat, stuffed and stiff as disapproving bishops; they could, he thought, serve as twin tombstones for whole gray generations.”
― Fred Chappell, Dagon

“Poetry is a mode of consciousness.”
― Fred Chappell

“What did he know about her, anyway? She was unfathomable. The simple fact that she countenanced Coke Rymer at all was unfathomable. All her motives were buried under the ocean.”
― Fred Chappell, Dagon

“And her face remembered was intractable entirely; it wouldn’t respond to any maneuver of his imagination, it offered no similes, as totally itself as the taste of garlic.”
― Fred Chappell, Dagon

“Each time I reach outside my skin/I just get lonesome for what's within.”
― Fred Chappell, River: A Poem

“She leaned back in a little creaky wooden chair and gave him a bald stark gaze. He felt enveloped in the stare, which was not a stare but simply an act of the eyes remaining still, those eyes which seemed as large as eggs, so gray they were almost white, reflecting, almost absolutely still. His skin had prickled at first, he had thought she had no nose, it was so small and flat, stretched on her face as smooth as wax. Leaned back in the chair that way, her body, flat and square, seemed as complacent as stone, all filled with calm waiting; this was her whole attitude. She played listlessly with her hair, looking at him. It was impossible. That body so stubby and that face so flatly ugly—something undeniably fishlike about it—and still, still it exercised upon him immediately an attraction, the fascination he might have in watching a snake uncoil itself lazily and curl along the ground. He couldn’t believe it; maybe it was the crazy musky odor of the house, confusing all his impressions, his senses. He had to use his whole will to take his eyes off her.”
― Fred Chappell, Dagon

“Dagon was simply one more of the pagan fertility deities; in Phoenicia his name was connected with the word dagan, meaning “corn,” though this name finally derived from a Semitic root meaning “fish.”
― Fred Chappell, Dagon

“I don’t put much stock in doctors. Do you remember Holme Barcroft? He said he was the kind of doctor who couldn’t even pull a splinter out of your thumb. I really am a doctor, he said, but not a medical doctor. It’s just some initials a university tacked onto my name. What does this university think you’re a doctor of? I asked him. Music, he said. Is that right? I told him, I hadn’t heard that music was sick. He smiled when I said that and it looked like his blue eyes got even bluer. I never saw blue eyes like that again. Well, maybe it’s not sick, but then I’m not through doctoring it yet, either, he said, and it pleasured me that he would be so nimble to come back with a remark after I’d said the sassiest thing to him I knew how.”
― Fred Chappell, Farewell, I'm Bound to Leave You