nina

“Literary work couldn't seriously force the whirlpool of debris that constituted the real into any grammatical or syntactical order.”
― Elena Ferrante, In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing

“How can a body be safe when it's only a body? How can we expect that no stranger will be tempted to torch an empty house?”
― Lillian Fishman, Acts of Service

“Little idiosyncratic expressions can form
A sense of who one is. Who one was.
One can, hypothetically, be brought back

In the form of an actor

Who gives an after the fact replication
Of text conveyed in a character's voice.
I can no more understand the world as a stage
Of myself, mired as I am,
In this missing.”
― Mary Jo Bang, Elegy

“It jars me. I remain in control but groping, grappling, wrestling with how to think of it. Here's one way. All those years, all those Labours, I'm living a completely socialist existence. The Labours have to be done and that is that. The Labours tell me when to go to bed, what to eat, what to wear, who to kill and what next. Then I come up from hell, Labours done and they say, Magic! Two o'clock today you are a capitalist! Figure it out! I find no assistance only degradation. I know no rules. I am assigned a therapist who tells me I'm fine. I watch myself become debased, hateful, resentful, mean, I yell all the time. You think psychopathy has nothing to do with the capitalist system? You're wrong. Capitalism farts cruelty like gas from a lawnmower.”
― Anne Carson, H of H Playbook