Meg Tuite > Meg's Quotes

“Looking down the barrel of your eye, I see the body of a Bloody Cinderella looking back.”
― Djuna Barnes, The Antiphon

“But then, time was its own sorcerer, sealed with the blood of whole civilizations that rose up and buried themselves in the bitter song of a single hour, and one could remember almost anything if they looked back far enough.”
― Meg Tuite

“–I'll just play the notes inside my skull alone in the dark where they roam around loose. 'Cause playing like a slave, I'd just step myself straight into a hangman's noose."
On Sissieretta Jones, Jess writes: "See, Sissie would know how to let folks into one mask and out through another. She'd even raise a toast to the mask, jokin about whether folk–black and white–really believed that the opera was wearing her as a mask, or if it just tickled them to see her puttin on that white mask of Vivaldi. Was it her voice or someone else's? they'd seem to ask. Well, it was all her. Every note, in whiteface or blackface or in just plain old American, went straight down to her bones. That's what I heard when I truly listened, anyway. She'd pour those opera songs all over her body and then dress herself in the church frock of hymns. She told me one time, that in order to hear her true voice, she'd had to ask herself about her own masks. What kind of mask might I have on? she said. Because let me tell you, most don't even know they're wearing a mask. You've got to know which masks, how many masks you're wearing before you can put it down and see your true self. Those that do, they know just how to slide in and out of it, how to make the world spin inside it and out of it. How to spread their song all over that mask and make it one with the world, no matter how thick or thin the truth in that song might be.”
― Tyehimba Jess, Olio

“It's always the heart, isn't it, even when it's not?”
― Kellie Wells, Compression Scars

“The night is the color of the eyelids of the dead.”
― Alejandra Pizarnik, Obras completas: Poesía & prosa

“The day my father killed off my mother was the day he stopped knowing me.”
― Lucia Berlin, A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories

“Behold space trembling like a great madman.”
― Alejandra Pizarnik, Obras completas: Poesía & prosa

“shutters as old as Herman Melville.”
― Lucia Berlin, A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories

“My mother says I had the airy beauty of something fleeting, features smeared hastily across a face soon to expire, and I waved my arms about in what seemed to her the hurried delight of a short lifespan.”
― Kellie Wells, Compression Scars

“We are adhering to life now with our last muscle--the heart.”
― Djuna Barnes, Nightwood

“A globular face mapped not on foreign landscapes and forgotten towns, but on a lifetime of voluntary entombment and inner warfare. The outside world had been locked out a long time ago. Lacey’s borders now wedged between the snap of two deadbolts and the power switch of her TV remote.”
― Meg Tuite, Domestic Apparition

“From the half-open doors of this chiffonier hung laces, ribands, stockings, ladies' underclothing and an abdominal brace, which gave the impression that the feminine finery had suffered venery.”
― Djuna Barnes, Nightwood

“I've never understood how so many barely literate people read the Bible so much. It's hard. In the same way it surprises me that uneducated seamstresses all over the world can figure out how to put in sleeves and zippers.”
― Lucia Berlin, A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories

“When our lips touched the day closed
into a coffin. In the museum of the heart...”
― Ocean Vuong, Night Sky with Exit Wounds

“I have been loved," she said, "by something strange, and it has forgotten me.”
― Djuna Barnes, Nightwood

“Love becomes the deposit of the heart, analogous in all degrees to the 'findings' in a tomb. As in one will be charted the taken place of the body, the raiment, the utensils necessary to its other life, so in the heart of the lover will be traced, as an indelible shadow, that which he loves.”
― Djuna Barnes, Nightwood

“Let us put it the other way, the Lutheran or Protestant church versus the Catholic. The Catholic is the girl that you love so much that she can lie to you, and the Protestant is the girl that loves you so much that you can lie to her, and pretend a lot that you do not feel.”
― Djuna Barnes

“She, alone, stood a graveless body by the endless coming of her seventh year.”
― Meg Tuite, Domestic Apparition

“Startled, I accidently knock over my inkwell. A black tsunami of ink sprawls out across the page, engulfing the tiny village of my words. They are swept away into the midnight sea. Gone forever. I am bereft.”
― Danger Slater, Love Me

“Regret is my compass. I am an alchemist, trained in the transmutation of my nervous system. I have installed trained guides beside me. I am saving at least one life."
"I keep writing. I must. Over and over and over. The same story a million ways.”
― Lee Gutkind, Show Me All Your Scars: True Stories of Living with Mental Illness

“Suppose the arbitrary violence that is bound into action shapes us.”
― Aaron Apps, Intersex

“I lived knowing I made myself up. You dreamt I was real. The story ends here where I am a hole you look into to see yourself. Because I am nothing, I can make you believe.”
― Kellie Wells, Compression Scars

“You were not there for the beginning. You will not be there for the end. Your knowledge of what is going on can only be superficial and relative”
― William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch: The Restored Text

“Have all beautiful things sad destinies?”
― Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea

“The first and only time I walked through the room I felt like millions of dead eyes were following me, all those frozen hands reaching out, as if they were all Peter's mother trying to protect her son in the darkness. That was when Peter started leaving the flashlight out for me."

"Rob pushed my head down with one hand and I closed my eyes and bent over and he was pushing his hand into my mouth and I could taste him and the denim scratched my cheeks and I sucked and pulled on the little fingers that weren't, trying to make them grow, to stretch them like a starfish, and I knew then, in that perfect moment, that I would never comb Rob's hair and feed him Doritos–I would be lighting his cigarettes and forging his disability checks–I would be his hands–and I knew then, as I was tracing little nubs with my tongue, that I would never be happy.”
― Lauren Leja

“Revolution is the sound of your heart still beating. and as long as it is, you have work to do. Do it. Without apology. Do it. Bravely and nobly. Do it. Exist, insist, and by all means, resist.”
― Dominique Christina

“I do not have easy days at home now and I drift between fear and helplessness in sunny rooms where it is unspeakably cold. Strange shudders of transformation, bodily experienced to the point of vulnerability, visions of mysteries until the certainty of having died, ecstasies to the point of stony petrifaction, and a continuation of dreaming sad dreams.”
― Georg Trakl

“Your body is a hyacinth,
Into which a monk dips his waxy fingers.
Our silence is a black cavern,
From which a soft animal steps at times
And slowly lowers heavy eyelids.
On your temples black dew drips,
The last gold of expired stars”
― Georg Trakl

“Cold metal walks across my forehead,
spiders search for my heart.
It is a light that goes out in my mouth...”
― Georg Trakl

“At the Moor

Wanderer in the black wind; quietly the dry reeds whisper
In the stillness of the moor. In the gray sky
A flock of wild birds follows;
Slanting over gloomy waters.

Turmoil. In decayed hut
The spirit of putrescence flutters with black wings.
Crippled birches in the autumn wind.

Evening in deserted tavern. The way home is scented all around
By the soft gloom of grazing herds;
Apparition of the night; toads plunge from brown waters.”
― Georg Trakl