Deirdre Conroy > Deirdre's Quotes

“it occurs to me that I must not know altogether what I am, either, and that others know certain things about me better than I do, though I think I ought to know all there is to know and I proceed as if I do. Even once I see this, however, I have no choice but to continue to proceed as if I know altogether what I am, though I may also try to guess, from time to time, just what it is that others know that I do not know.”
― Lydia Davis, The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

“At a certain point in her life, she realises it is not so much that she wants to have a child as that she does not want not to have a child, or not to have had a child.”
― Lydia Davis, Samuel Johnson Is Indignant

“We feel an affinity with a certain thinker because we agree with him; or because he shows us what we were already thinking; or because he shows us in a more articulate form what we were already thinking; or because he shows us what we were on the point of thinking; or what we would sooner or later have thought; or what we would have thought much later if we hadn’t read it now; or what we would have been likely to think but never would have thought if we hadn’t read it now; or what we would have liked to think but never would have thought if we hadn’t read it now.”
― Lydia Davis, Almost No Memory

“I looked like a woman in glasses, but I had dreams of leading a very different kind of life, the life of a woman who would not wear glasses, the kind of woman I saw from a distance now and then in a bar.”
― Lydia Davis, The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

“Like a tropical storm, I, too, may one day become ‘better organized.”
― Lydia Davis, The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

“We only know four boring people. The rest of our friends we find very interesting. However, most of the friends we find interesting find us boring: the most interesting find us the most boring. The few who are somewhere in the middle, with whom there is reciprocal interest, we distrust: at any moment, we feel, they may become too interesting for us, or we too interesting for them.”
― Lydia Davis

“I guess you get to a point where you look at that pain as if it were in front of you three feet away lying in a box, an open box, in a window somewhere. It's hard and cold, like a bar of metal. You just look at it there and say, Alright, I'll take it, I'll buy it. That's what it is.”
― Lydia Davis, The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

“If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.”
― Toni Morrison

“Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering.”
― Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

“A good friend will always stab you in the front.”
― Oscar Wilde

“How many performance artists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
I don't know. I left early.”
― Lynne Tillman, No Lease on Life

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

“There are times when the law jeopardizes those who obey it.”
― Kathy Acker, Pussy, King of the Pirates

“I have become interested in languages which I cannot make up, which I cannot create or even create in: I have become interested in languages which I can only come up upon (as I disappear), a pirate upon buried treasure. The dreamer, the dreaming, the dream. I call these languages, languages of the body.”
― Kathy Acker, Bodies of Work: Essays

“GET RID OF MEANING. YOUR MIND IS A NIGHTMARE THAT HAS BEEN EATING YOU: NOW EAT YOUR MIND.”
― Kathy Acker

“There's a point at which when I start to know a man well--this isn't true of women--I wonder whether there's something in him that's evil. Something that's pure and can't be touched. This quality of evil may be related to the quality of artistry, for an artist has the same characteristics.”
― Kathy Acker, My Mother: Demonology

“Eurydice sits alone on a red bed. She has flaming red hair, so flaming that you can't see anything else of her, much less anything else around her.
She takes up too much space. Also she's mad. Which has nothing to do with anything. She lives in her own world because she makes the whole world hers.”
― Kathy Acker, Eurydice in the Underworld

“Can’t good come around sometimes through some strange back doors?”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.”
― Oscar Wilde

“A great sorrow, and one that I am only beginning to understand: we don’t get to choose our own hearts. We can’t make ourselves want what’s good for us or what’s good for other people. We don’t get to choose the people we are.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“It is as if the eye forces forms to communicate.”
― Carl Watson

“You can buy liquor at a store from a fat man whose face is fractured comically behind the chicken-wire cage. It's comical because he thinks this chicken wire protects him.”
― Carl Watson, Beneath the Empire of the Birds

“The politicians on the front page of the morning edition however weren't laughing, they were serious. They were calling each other liars in large black letters. They seemed to be illustrating that arcane evolutionary theory that politicians are really ugly larval prototypes of our simpler more primitive selves, controlled by gut-level chemical reactions, and broadcast from the inner depts. of the sub-libido in order to impose order on what is really simply ridiculous.”
― Carl Watson, Beneath the Empire of the Birds

“Like so many people, Taylor thought he could not live- that he needed something harder, brighter, more extreme to properly live. The spiritual conquest of nature required a separation between mind and body- this he knew. He knew love must destroy its object and life must devour itself. But why he knew these things he did not know.”
― Carl Watson, Beneath the Empire of the Birds

“There was one floor that was all gynecologists. They could tell by the remnants of weird optical contraptions- all the convoluted tools men use when they're searching for the source of their anxieties.”
― Carl Watson, Beneath the Empire of the Birds

“You never could know the truth anyway so you might as well put it together whatever way that pleased you.”
― Carl Watson, Beneath the Empire of the Birds

“Soon everyone knew it, or at least believed it. Their jaws dropped and bounced like rubber balls, and their disconcertion rang out like cash register change drawers punctuating a tune of degraded consumption. Indeed by some definitions, the room could be said to have warmed a bit with a certain pleasure of conviviality, people enjoying each other's company, empathizing with each other's plight.”
― Carl Watson, Beneath the Empire of the Birds

“There are many rates of vibration it seems, many degrees of density, classes and sub planes. If you draw horizontal lines to indicate some, there are others which also must be perpendicular. This assures that every thought produces a double, that at least two separate vibrations always appear. This means the majority of human thoughts are not simple. Things like absolute pure affection probably do exist but more often we find them tinged with pride, jealousy, or animal passion. In the age of chaos water equals oil and everything is simultaneous.”
― Carl Watson, Beneath the Empire of the Birds

“I said they have wounds and their wounds are like pockets on the body that you reach into because you are carrying in there, some little piece of something, some anxious object that gratifies you for reasons you couldn't know- your heart disguised as your mind maybe, your memory like an animal hunting a human through a vacuous past, a pet placebo.”
― Carl Watson, Beneath the Empire of the Birds