The Confessions of Frannie Langton

by Sara Collins

‘Byron is proof, if ever it were needed, that a man is merely spoiled by his vices while a woman is soiled by hers. Oh, Frances, Frances, don’t you think everyone should be prescribed a poem a day? Woman cannot live on novels alone!’

A novel is like a long, warm drink but a poem is a spike through the head.

All those good-doers, sniffing at the carcass of slavery, craving always to hear the worst thing. The worst thing isn’t that it strips the world to scraps and forces you to fight for them; the worst thing is that one of those scraps is yourself.

A man writes to separate himself from the common history. A woman writes to try to join it.

I see that your own life can be a story you tell yourself, that you can be both the person reading and the thing being read.

Only two types of white people in this world, chile, the ones doing shit to you and the ones wanting you to tell them ’bout the shit them other ones did.

‘Though I think the point of reading is not to feel more a part of the world, but less. To take oneself out of it. On paper, everything can be hammered into shape, though the world is shapeless.’

How true it is that ugly people have hope while pretty people have expectation.

this. I was a woman who loved a woman, chief among the womanly sins, like barrenness and thinking.

‘No man can be as clever as the world thinks he is,’

One word frees us of all the weight and pain of life: That word is love.

Blacks will write only about suffering, and only for white people, as if our purpose here is to change their minds.

Because life boils down to nothing, in spite of all the fuss, yet novels make it possible to believe it is something, after all.