Simeon Berry > Simeon's Quotes

“Forget trying to pass for normal. Follow your geekdom. Embrace nerditude. In the immortal words of Lafcadio Hearn, a geek of incredible obscurity whose work is still in print after a hundred years, “Woo the muse of the odd.” You may be a geek. You may have geek written all over you. You should aim to be one geek they'll never forget. Don't aim to be civilized. Don’t hope that straight people will keep you on as some sort of pet. To hell with them. You should fully realize what society has made of you and take a terrible revenge. Get weird. Get way weird. Get dangerously weird. Get sophisticatedly, thoroughly weird, and don't do it halfway. Put every ounce of horsepower you have behind it. Don't become a well-rounded person. Well-rounded people are smooth and dull. Become a thoroughly spiky person. Grow spikes from every angle. Stick in their throats like a pufferfish.”
― Bruce Sterling

“There is no such thing as inner peace. There is only nervousness and death.”
― Fran Lebowitz, Metropolitan Life

“The room was not a room to elevate the soul. Louis XIV, to pick a name at random, would not have liked it, would have found it not sunny enough, and insufficiently full of mirrors. He would have desired someone to pick up the socks, put the records away, and maybe burn the place down. Michelangelo would have been distressed by its proportions, which were neither lofty nor shaped by any noticeable inner harmony or symmetry, other than that all parts of the room were pretty much equally full of old coffee mugs, shoes and brimming ashtrays, most of which were sharing their tasks with each other. The walls were painted in almost precisely that shade of green which Rafaello Sanzio would have bitten off his own right hand at the wrist rather than use, and Hercules, on seeing the room, would probably have returned half an hour later armed with a navigable river.”
― Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

“As you know, Joyce was a writer who asked his reader to give him a lifetime,” he said. “I am that reader, and I can tell you it was a wasted life.”
― Philip Levine, The Bread of Time: Toward an Autobiography

“I don't know about you, but I'm kind of fed up with realism. After all, there's enough reality already; why make more of it? Why not leave realism for the memoirs of drug addicts, the histories of salt, the biographies of porn stars? Why must we continue to read about the travails of divorced people or mildly depressed Canadians when we could be contemplating the shopping habits of zombies, or the difficulties that ensue when living and dead people marry each other? We should be demanding more stories about faery handbags and pyjamas inscribed with the diaries of strange women. We should not rest until someone writes about a television show that features the Free People's World-Tree Library, with its elaborate waterfalls and Forbidden Books and Pirate-Magicians. We should be pining for a house haunted by rabbits.

(from the review of Kelly Link's Magic for Beginners in The Guardian)”
― Audrey Niffenegger

“She did not think it any coincidence that ideas denigrating literary authorship had taken center stage simultaneously with the emergence of formerly silent voices for whom the act of writing, and publishing, had the deepest and most delicious possible meaning, simultaneously with the emergence of an audience for whom the act of thinking and writing was an act of skeptical anger, sometimes a transitional act to violence.”
― Jane Smiley, Moo

“A gentleman is someone who can play the accordion, but doesn't.”
― Tom Waits

“Slowly, I began to relearn something I’d once grasped but had lost sight of: that emotion—that central element of fiction—derives not from information or from explanation, nor from a logical arrangement of the facts, but specifically from powerful images and from the qualities of language: diction, rhythm, form, structure, association, metaphor. And sometimes I also had glimmers of another thing I’d once known: how effectively information can be used to wall off emotion.”
― Andrea Barrett

“The cruellest thing you can do to Kerouac is reread him at thirty-eight.”
― Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia

“...Jesus did not advocate nonviolence merely as a technique for outwitting the enemy, but as a just means of opposing the enemy in such a way as to hold open the possibility of the enemy's becoming just as well. Both sides must win. We are summoned to pray for our enemies' transformation, and to respond to ill-treatment with a love that not only is godly but also, I am convinced, can only be found in God.”
― Walter Wink, Jesus and Nonviolence: A Third Way

“for God's sake, let's be done with the hypocrisy of claiming "I am a biblical literalist" when everyone is a selective literalist, especially those who swear by the antihomosexual laws in the Book of Leviticus and then feast on barbecued ribs and delight in Monday-night football, for it is toevali, an abomination, not only to eat pork but merely to touch the skin of a dead pig.”
― Walter Wink, Homosexuality and Christian Faith: Questions of Conscience for the Churches

“I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.”
― Virginia Woolf

“She remembered one of her boyfriends asking, offhandedly, how many books she read in a year. "A few hundred," she said.
"How do you have the time?" he asked, gobsmacked.
She narrowed her eyes and considered the array of potential answers in front of her. Because I don't spend hours flipping through cable complaining there's nothing on? Because my entire Sunday is not eaten up with pre-game, in-game, and post-game talking heads? Because I do not spend every night drinking overpriced beer and engaging in dick-swinging contests with the other financirati? Because when I am waiting in line, at the gym, on the train, eating lunch, I am not complaining about the wait/staring into space/admiring myself in reflective surfaces? I am reading!
"I don't know," she said, shrugging.”
― Eleanor Brown, The Weird Sisters

“It is not easy to be honest because it is impossible to be complete.”
― Ariana Reines

“The capacity for friendship is God's way of apologizing for our families.”
― Jay McInerney, The Last of the Savages

“A DESCRIPTION OF HAPPINESS IN KOBENHAVN

All this windless day snow fell
into the King's Garden
where I walked, perfecting and growing old,
abandoning one by one everybody:
randomly in love with the paradise
furnace of my mind. Now I sit in the dark,
dreaming of a marble sun
and its strictness. This
is to tell you I am not coming back.
To tell you instead of my private life
among people who must wrestle their hearts
in order to feel anything, as though it were
unnatural. What I master by day
still lapses in the night. But I go on
with the cargo cult, blindly feeling the snow
come down, learning to flower by tightening.”
― Jack Gilbert

“Long, intense silences follow, which you endure by staring out the window at a lawn so deeply green it looks botanically assassinated…”
― Simeon Berry, Ampersand Revisited

“Every night, just before you fall asleep, other voices start talking amongst themselves in the monochrome waters at the deep end of your brain…”
― Simeon Berry, Ampersand Revisited

“You’re not certain, but you suspect that most other people’s evenings are not ending in tears. Outside the window, iced branches click emptily in the wind…”
― Simeon Berry, Ampersand Revisited

“When you finally answer his calls, & he asks what you’ve been doing, you reply, Thinking about the Sumerians, because you don’t want to seem lazy…”
― Simeon Berry, Ampersand Revisited

“These are latter days. You regard the writ of frost on the window pane as a blueprint for something yet to come. Something severe & detailed…”
― Simeon Berry, Ampersand Revisited

“Your sheets are stark parchment, lit by a burning telegram that gives off the incense of human hair…”
― Simeon Berry, Ampersand Revisited

“The low, afternoon light solders the sliding glass door into a slab of gold circuitry you step through...”
― Simeon Berry, Ampersand Revisited

“Your hair freezes, making you shiver presciently like the wise child in the Brothers Grimm…”
― Simeon Berry, Ampersand Revisited

“I’d like to walk again in her weather, in the dark through the fog, / its gray damage // laid down all over town…”
― Simeon Berry, Ampersand Revisited

“The art of staying alive when the story darkens with the dusk of plot means being too much of a bother…”
― Simeon Berry, Ampersand Revisited

“There they were safe. Or at least equally in danger. He—like other New England fishermen—could not swim. These are the people I come from.”
― Simeon Berry, Monograph: Poems

“Clearly, she did not want to be recognized as anything other than a depressed person. There are worse uniforms, I suppose.”
― Simeon Berry, Monograph: Poems

“This is analogous to how we talk about poems with risk in them—ultimately a dangerous metaphor. It tends to imply that the writer is the real victim here.”
― Simeon Berry, Monograph: Poems

“I quickly lose patience with the celestial merit badges of the New Agers.”
― Simeon Berry, Monograph: Poems