Tegan (Slant Postscripts) > Tegan's Quotes

“Today, finishing this, I am feeling better, but perhaps, tomorrow, I will not. That is okay. It is okay not to feel better. It is okay not to produce art. There is so much pressure, in narrative, for us to 'recover', to reach 'catharsis', to find 'resolution', to 'speak out'. I offer resolution here because I have found it, but that resolution is as much truth as sleight of hand, a conjuring trick. I may never manage to 'resolve' what has happened to me. In naming it, I have learned to live with it, and this in turn breaks a pattern of suffering. Naming is, for me, a magical act: it is a way of saying daily, I am alive. I have harnessed naming to bring order to chaos. Naming maps experience into history. Contains, within it, a legacy and a lineage: it offers up a spectrum of thought. But naming cannot undo what was done. Hope, for me, is found in the telling.”
― Jessica Cornwell, Birth Notes: A Memoir of Recovery

“I hate myself. I hate this world;
And I long now only to quit it,
But tell me, oh God, where my place is,
In the new world, or don’t I fit in it?”
― Lilian Morgan, Poetical Works

“But to look back from the stony plain along the road which led one to that place is not at all the same thing as walking on the road; the perspective to say the very least, changes only with the journey; only when the road has, all abruptly and treacherously, and with an absoluteness that permits no argument, turned or dropped or risen is one able to see all that one could not have seen from any other place.”
― James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain

“I don't deny that he was good. A man to be admired in a play–grand, with an iron will... But such men turn their wives and daughters into slaves. They would rule the world if they could; but not ruling the world, they throw all the weight of their will on the necks and souls of women. But nature sometimes thwarts them. My father had no other child than his daughter, and she was like himself.”
― George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

“I can't say that I ever feel what it felt like then, when I was happy. But sometimes something will touch the place where that feeling was, a touch as slight and swift as the brush of a moth's wing in the dark.”
― Geraldine Brooks, Year of Wonders

“In fact I need you to know it was all true. The friendly guy who helps you move and assists senior citizens in the pool is the same guy who assaulted me. One person can be capable of both. Society often fails to wrap its head around the fact that these truths often coexist, they are not mutually exclusive. Bad qualities can hide inside a good person. That's the terrifying part.”
― Chanel Miller, Know My Name

“Night is when fear comes to us at its fullest, when we have no way to fight it. It will do everything it can to seep inside you. Sometimes it may succeed - but never think that you are the night.”
― Samantha Shannon, The Priory of the Orange Tree

“Witch. The word slithers from the mouth like a serpent, drips from the tongue as thick and black as tar. We never thought of ourselves as witches, my mother and I. For this was a word invented by men, a word that brings power to those that speak it, not those that it describes. A word that builds gallows and pyres, turns breathing women into corpses.”
― Emilia Hart, Weyward

“What Am I to Write?

What am I to write for you?
Blank page,
White emptiness,
Broken words are not enough
Nor spluttered ink spat out in ignorance,
Contemptuous of its desire to mark
And maim,
Indulges so at first,
And then again.
But No
I will not take to mediocre ways,
Nor overplay the passion song in muse,
For the heart well tuned
Needs not the head
To pump its life,
And the arteries awakened to the rhythm,
Subtle rhythm,
Should suffice.”
― Iona Matheson, In Retrospect

“Man of the Sea

For the woman I see
Who stands by the rock,
And the tree,
Who put meaning and measure and might
Into all things
For me,
Who taught songs of the earth
And showed me the places of light,
Who then put the 'Orb' in my hand,
And bade me the Final Goodnight.
・・・・・
No man ever born
Could make courage to riseth
Like She,
This spirit that dwells
And excels,
And is living, through me.”
― Iona Matheson, In Retrospect

“Woman of the Sea

To the men of the sea
Who sail with the wind
And are free,
To the Land that has borne them
And the seed that has torn them
From me,
For I gave it willing, without grieving,
To the sons of my soul,
Who in seeking the truth of existence
Have quenched the starvation in me,
For I, am but woman,
And all, 'tis all I shall be.”
― Iona Matheson, In Retrospect