nina > nina's Quotes

“It jars me. I remain in control but groping, grappling, wrestling with how to think of it. Here's one way. All those years, all those Labours, I'm living a completely socialist existence. The Labours have to be done and that is that. The Labours tell me when to go to bed, what to eat, what to wear, who to kill and what next. Then I come up from hell, Labours done and they say, Magic! Two o'clock today you are a capitalist! Figure it out! I find no assistance only degradation. I know no rules. I am assigned a therapist who tells me I'm fine. I watch myself become debased, hateful, resentful, mean, I yell all the time. You think psychopathy has nothing to do with the capitalist system? You're wrong. Capitalism farts cruelty like gas from a lawnmower.”
― Anne Carson, H of H Playbook

“If an animal is shocked, escapably or inescapably, she will manifest deep attachment for whoever has shocked her. If she has manifested deep attachment for whoever has shocked her, she will manifest deeper reactions of attachment for whoever has shocked her and then dragged her off the electrified grid. Perhaps she will develop deep feelings of attachment for electrified grids. Perhaps she will develop deep feelings of attachment for what is not the electrified grids. Perhaps she will develop deep feelings of attachment for dragging. She may also develop deep feelings of attachment for science, laboratories, experimentation, electricity, and informative forms of torture.”
― Anne Boyer, Garments Against Women

“You wondered, when she came along, if this was what most people got to experience in their lives: a straight line from want to satisfaction; desire manifested and satisfied in reasonable succession. This had never been the case before; it had always been fraught. How many times had you said, 'If I just looked a little different, I'd be drowning in love'? Now you got to drown without needing to change a single cell. Lucky you.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“How can a body be safe when it's only a body? How can we expect that no stranger will be tempted to torch an empty house?”
― Lillian Fishman, Acts of Service

“Little idiosyncratic expressions can form
A sense of who one is. Who one was.
One can, hypothetically, be brought back

In the form of an actor

Who gives an after the fact replication
Of text conveyed in a character's voice.
I can no more understand the world as a stage
Of myself, mired as I am,
In this missing.”
― Mary Jo Bang, Elegy

“My loneliness, my sleepless darling
reminds herself
the fruit that falls increases
at the speed of the body rising to meet it.”
― Li-Young Lee, Book of My Nights: Poems

“[Ibykos fr. 286 translated using only words
from p. 47 of Endgame by Samuel Beckett]

In your kitchen, on the one hand,
bright corpses
starting to stink of having an idea,
where one of my legs [is]
and beneath sooner or later
the whole universe
doesn't ring and won't work.
On the other hand, I shouldn't think so.
Nay Rather,
like a speck in the void,
pacing to and fro,
accompanied by the alarm,
frankly,
angrily,
impatiently,
not very convinced,
[it] kisses me goodbye. I'm dead. (Pause).”
― Anne Carson

“It's not so much time is circular as time
confuses memory with hope and fear
which often looks like the future”
― Jennifer Nelson

“Literary work couldn't seriously force the whirlpool of debris that constituted the real into any grammatical or syntactical order.”
― Elena Ferrante, In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing