Andrea Maria Popelka > Andrea's Quotes

“All that you touch
You Change.

All that you Change
Changes you.

The only lasting truth
is Change.

God
is Change.”
― Octavia E. Butler

“If you ask me what I want, I'll tell you. I want everything.”
― Kathy Acker

“To feel anything
deranges you. To be seen
feeling anything strips you
naked. In the grip of it
pleasure or pain doesn’t
matter. You think what
will they do what new
power will they acquire if
they see me naked like
this. If they see you
feeling. You have no idea
what. It’s not about them.
To be seen is the penalty.”
― Anne Carson, Red Doc>

“There is a lot of room for a meaning inside a "no" spoken in the tremendous logic of a refused order of the world. Poetry's no can protect a potential yes--or more precisely, poetry's no is the one that can protect the hell yeah, or every hell yeah's variations. In this way, every poem against the police is also and always a guardian of love for the world.”
― Anne Boyer, A Handbook of Disappointed Fate

“Living alone, I began to split apart from myself in a deeper and more grotesque way than ever before.”
― Megan Nolan, Acts of Desperation

“Monster” is derived from the Latin noun monstrum, “divine portent,” itself formed on the root of the verb monere, “to warn.” It came to refer to living things of anomalous shape or structure, or to fabulous creatures like the sphinx who were composed of strikingly incongruous parts, because the ancients considered the appearance of such beings to be a sign of some impending supernatural event. Monsters, like angels, functioned as messengers and heralds of the extraordinary. They served to announce impending revelation, saying, in effect, “Pay attention; something of profound importance is happening.”
― Susan Stryker

“I write and that way rid myself of me and then at last I can rest.”
― Clarice Lispector

“As a culture worker who belongs to an oppressed people my job is to make revolution irresistible.”
― Toni Cade Bambara, Conversations with Toni Cade Bambara

“I only want to live in peace, plant potatoes and dream!”
― Tove Jansson, Moomin: The Complete Tove Jansson Comic Strip, Vol. 01

“Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.”
― Primo Levi

“My mother did not need much food - she ran on wrath (pp94)”
― Hilary Mantel, An Experiment in Love

“...your kinks aren't arbitrary things your brain comes up with. They're not coincidences from childhood that you fetishize. Or: they could be. But kinks are arrows giving you directions. If you're hot for being whipped, that probably says something about your relationship to guilt and punishment, or pain, or something... It's always complicated and emotionally volatile but there's also no reason to be ashamed of it.”
― Imogen Binnie, Nevada

“you can't be one of the people in a relationship if you're busily refusing to be a person.”
― Imogen Binnie, Nevada

“Good work last night, whiskey, too bad you can’t make sleep as restful as you make it deep.”
― Imogen Binnie, Nevada

“I know what loves are trembling into fire; how jealousy shoots its green flashes hither and thither; how intricately love crosses love; love makes knots; love brutally tears them apart. I have been knotted; I have been torn apart.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“It was a desire, an echo, a sound; she could drape it in color, see it in form, hear it in music, but not in words; no, never in words. She sighed, teased by desires so incoherent, so incommunicable.”
― Virginia Woolf

“One of the things I think is true, which is a way of thinking about the afterlife of slavery in regard to how we inhabit historical time, is the sense of temporal entanglement, where the past, the present and the future, are not discrete and cut off from one another, but rather that we live the simultaneity of that entanglement. This is almost common sense to Black folk. How does one narrate that?”
― Saidiya Hartman

“History is made up of fragments and absences. What is left out is as significant as what is included.”
― Walter Benjamin

“Human beings are so made that the ones who do the crushing feel nothing; it is the person crushed who feels what is happening. Unless one has placed oneself on the side of the oppressed, to feel with them, one cannot understand.”
― Simone Weil, Lectures on Philosophy

“When they made love
Geryon liked to touch in slow succession each of the bones of Herakles' back
as it arched away from him into who knows what dark dream of its own, running both hands all the way down
from the base of the neck
to the end of the spine which he can cause to shiver like a root in the rain.”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

“Girls are cruelest to themselves.
Someone like Emily Brontë,
who remained a girl all her life despite her body as a woman,
had cruelty drifted up in all the cracks of her like spring snow.”
― Anne Carson, Glass, Irony and God

“Perhaps the hardest thing about losing a lover is
to watch the year repeat its days.
It is as if I could dip my hand down

into time and scoop up
blue and green lozenges of April heat
a year ago in another country.

I can feel that other day running underneath this one
like an old videotape”
― Anne Carson, Glass, Irony and God

“Like the wild beasts, she lives without a future. She inhabits only the present tense, a fugue of the continuous, a world of sensual immediacy as without hope as it is without despair.”
― Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories

“Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.”
― Doris Lessing

“What's terrible is to pretend that second-rate is first-rate. To pretend that you don't need love when you do; or you like your work when you know quite well you're capable of better.”
― Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook

“Then a miracle occurred in the form of a plate of sandwiches.
Geryon took three and buried his mouth in a delicious block of white bread filled with tomatoes and butter and salt.
He thought about how delicious it was, how he liked slippery foods, how slipperiness can be of different kinds.
I am a philosopher of sandwiches, he decided. Things good on the inside.”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

“I want there to be a place in the world where people can engage in one another’s differences in a way that is redemptive, full of hope and possibility. Not this “In order to love you, I must make you something else”. That’s what domination is all about, that in order to be close to you, I must possess you, remake and recast you.”
― bell hooks, Reel to Real: Race, Sex, and Class at the Movies