madilyn > madilyn's Quotes

“When the word ends, there'll be no more air. That's why it's important to pollute the air now.”
― Kathy Acker, Don Quixote

“If we keep on fucking, I'm not gonna die.”
― Kathy Acker, Eurydice in the Underworld

“Life doesn't exist inside language: too bad for me.”
― Kathy Acker, My Mother: Demonology

“TODAY I THINK MY RELATIONSHIP WITH HELL IS OVER. It was hell, the ancient hell. Hell: I believed that if I loved V enough, we would love each other.
All I know is that I’ve been returned to earth violently; I’ve a duty to myself to survive and to see what is. I have to deal with the truth, with nothing else.
Did V’s charity to me almost cause my death?
I, starving, fed on the dream that V loved me and I lived a lie. So forgive me, You who knows that only truth matters.
Yes—this dawn is at best difficult.
The blood he let out of my skin, now dried and stiff, hurts me and there’s nothing else in my life but memories of him. Mental war is constant.
Nonetheless, this is the eve before the morning.
May I accept the influxes of vigor and whatever real tenderness floats by in these barren waters. And when dawn comes, armed with my patience which burns, I shall see the cities of humans which are splendid.
The imagination is nothing unless it is made actual.”
― Kathy Acker, In Memoriam to Identity

“I'm looking for what might be called a body language. One thing I do is stick a vibrator up my cunt and start writing -- writing from the point of orgasm and losing control of the language and seeing what that's like.”
― Kathy Acker

“I want to get out of here means I want to be innocent.”
― Kathy Acker, My Mother: Demonology

“There must be a secret hidden in this book or else you wouldn't bother to read it”
― Kathy Acker

“Murder is a dream because lack is the center of both.”
― Kathy Acker, My Mother: Demonology

“All my life I've dreamt dreams that, after the initial dreaming, stayed with me and kept telling me how to perceive and consider all that happens to me. Dreams run through my skin and veins, coloring all that lies beneath.”
― Kathy Acker, My Mother: Demonology

“If you live in the dark a long time and the sun comes out, you do not cross into it whistling. There's an initial uprush of relief at first, then-for me, anyway- a profound dislocation. My old assumptions about how the world works are buried, yet my new ones aren't yet operational.There's been a death of sorts, but without a few days in hell, no resurrection is possible.”
― Mary Karr, Lit

“There's a space at the bottom of an exhale, a little hitch between taking in and letting out that's a perfect zero you can go into. There's a rest point between the heart muscle's close and open - an instant of keenest living when you're momentarily dead. You can rest there.”
― Mary Karr, Lit

“Those are only rumors of suffering. Real suffering has a face and a smell. It lasts in the most intense form no matter what you drape over it. And it knows your name.”
― Mary Karr, The Liars' Club

“After a lifetime of hounding authors for advice, I've heard three truths from every mouth: (1) Writing is painful -- it's 'fun' only for novices, the very young, and hacks; (2) other than a few instances of luck, good work only comes through revision; (3) the best revisers often have reading habits that stretch back before the current age, which lends them a sense of history and raises their standards for quality.”
― Mary Karr, The Art of Memoir

“In some ways, writing a memoir is knocking yourself out with your own fist, if it’s done right.”
― Mary Karr, The Art of Memoir

“It is foolish to think that we will enter heaven without entering into ourselves.”
― St. Teresa of Avila

“The closer one approaches to God, the simpler one becomes.”
― St. Therese of the Child Jesus

“For prayer is nothing else than being on terms of friendship with God.”
― St. Teresa of Avila

“I experienced pleasure like a future pain.”
― Annie Ernaux, Simple Passion

“I dream and it is
another life.”
― Frank Stanford, What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford

“my life I love it
in the dark
under the water of my shadow music
my form
and substance lonely and blue as ever

— Frank Stanford, The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You (Lost Roads Publishers, 2000)”
― Frank Stanford, The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You

“Amaranth"

There are no starfish in the sky tonight,
But there is one below your belly,
And there are cold evenings in your eyes.

If I could get to your house
I would look under the bed of your childhood,
The tongueless loafer without laces or eyes,
The cave of your young foot
With its odor of moon, its dampness
Coming from underground, your shoe
Which also bled and is now an island.

You have to remember these are the memories
Of a survivor, you have to remember.

You could be looking for clay to haul away,
Fill for the deep washouts of your love.
All your old loves, they bled to death, too.

Your hair is like a cemetery full of hands,
Fingers in the moonlight.

When you come down to the heart
Bring your post-hole diggers and crowbar.
Do not set a corner, a fence won’t last.
Do not bury our first child there,
Or set a post,
Although I have tasted blood on the lips of a stranger,
At night and in the rain.”
― Frank Stanford, What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford

“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“I write to discover what I know.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I'm always irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it's very shocking to the system.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

“I write because I don't know what I think until I read what I say.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live...We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”
― Joan Didion, The White Album

“I can, with one eye squinted, take it all as a blessing.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

“I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us; we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be.”
― C.S. Lewis

“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity