Matri > Matri's Quotes

“Everyone who comes takes a little — a favour here, an hour there, your attention, your patience, the benefit of the doubt, one more small yes — each request reasonable, each taker likeable, and the sum of it, by evening, by year's end: knee height. Nothing left standing tall enough to flower.
People who feel this usually diagnose themselves with weakness, or exhaustion, or — the modern favourite — insufficient self-care, as though the answer were a scented bath. The gardener's diagnosis is simpler and has no shame in it at all: no fence. Not a character flaw. An infrastructure problem.”
― Matri, The Spine

“An instrument does not play itself.”
― Matri, The Spine

“Name the string, and it stops ringing.”
― Matri, The Spine

“Contentment is not the end of wanting. It is the end of being run by wanting.”
― Matri, The Spine

“You do not clean the glass to create light. You clean the glass to stop blocking a light that was never yours to create.”
― Matri, The Spine

“There is a small silence — not an absence; a making-of-room.”
― Matri, Bliss Is Your Birthright

“The love of a person with no boundaries is weather — it falls on you because it falls on everything.”
― Matri, The Spine

“Whoever taught you that boundaries are unkind was, look closely, usually standing on the profitable side of your missing fence.”
― Matri, The Spine

“In those seasons the No is not self-care. It is guardianship — the fierce clean No of the one who stands between the grazing world and the thing that cannot yet stand for itself — and it is the single most loving syllable in the language.”
― Matri, The Spine

“The mind is a sieve, the boy says — pour the ocean through it and come back and find it dry; whatever it is given, it has already stopped counting. Now put a crown on the sieve and hand it the treasury of the world. That was Cyrus. Lydia down, Ionia down, Babylon swallowed in a night without a battle — and the same restlessness back on a horse the next season, riding at a grass country with nothing in it he could spend. Because the appetite was never for anything, keeper. That is the machine's founding secret, first edition, every edition: it cannot arrive. It can only continue.”
― Matri, Bliss Is Your Birthright

“He had been drinking the world for thirty years and calling the thirst destiny, and a widow on the grass, whose son he had spent as tackle, sat the head of the machine down at its last table and taught it the one word missing from its whole vocabulary. Enough.”
― Matri, Bliss Is Your Birthright

“Peacocks see everything. They have eyes all the way down their tails. Nobody thinks to ask them.”
― Matri, Zenvoyage: Smilo and the Enchanted Forest

“So watch, too, how a woman grows the one thing the tests cannot get into.”
― Matri, Bliss Is Your Birthright