A. > A.'s Quotes

“If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.”
― John Cage

“Alice laughed. 'There's no use trying,' she said. 'One can't believe impossible things.'

I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. 'When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. There goes the shawl again!”
― Lewis Carroll

“See how weak prose is.... Presently I shall go to a bar and there one or two poets will speak to me and I to them and we will try to destroy each other or attract each other and nothing will happen because we will be speaking in prose.”
― Jack Spicer

“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’

’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’

’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”
― Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

“FEMALE VOICE: 'The truth is people are pushed around by two men who move all the bodies on earth into patterns that please them.'

MALE VOICE: 'I love my mind when it is fucking the cracks of events.'

MALE VOICE: 'What I give to all the people who do not want to live with me is arithmetic.'

FEMALE VOICE: 'Everyday, I do nothing important because I am scared blank and lazy. But then the men come. I put my mouth on them. I spit and write with the wet.'

MALE VOICE: 'I was not born live. This body grew but I did not feel cells split.”
― Jenny Holzer

“Dance is an art in space and time. The object of the dancer is to obliterate that.”
― Merce Cunningham

“Language is an old-growth forest of the mind.”
― Wade Davis

“Love goes away when your mind goes away and then you're someone else.”
― Kathy Acker, Blood and Guts in High School

“I don't even hate books anymore.”
― Leonard Cohen

“Is it not first through the voice that one becomes animal?”
― Deleuze, Mille plateaux

“The mouth remembers what the brain can’t quite wrap its tongue around & that’s what my life’s become. My life’s become my mouth’s remembering, telling stories with the brain’s tongue.”
― B.P. Nichol

“perhaps within me the desire to put off that which I most in the world desire of late keeps watch, I mean, to write a book but a wounded book, a contentious, broken book, a book not pleased to be a book, to be only a book, to be born in the absence of my friend, a book incapable of acting as if the last times were not upon us, but which at the same time cannot act as if it were only a book hence a being unaware of the end, unaware what time it is.”
― Hélène Cixous

“And why don't you write? Write! Writing is for you, you are for you; your body is yours, take it. I know why you haven't written. (And why I didn't write before the age of twenty-seven.) Because writing is at once too high, too great for you, it's reserved for the great-that is for "great men"; and it's "silly."

Besides, you've written a little, but in secret. And it wasn't good, because it was in secret, and because you punished yourself for writing, because you didn't go all the way, or because you wrote, irresistibly, as when we would masturbate in secret, not to go further, but to attenuate the tension a bit, just enough to take the edge off. And then as soon as we come, we go and make ourselves feel guilty-so as to be forgiven; or to forget, to bury it until the next time.”
― Hélène Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa

“To be afraid is the condition of loving knowledge. Were I not dying of fear, I'd not know how to exist myself, I wouldn't get the notices of existence, I wouldn't record with delight the miniscule passage of a blue tit, its wing dipped in gold on the dusk. Were I not dying of sorrow I wouldn't with nostalgia be present at the creation of the world, the squirrel nuptials this morning I wouldn't care. Creatures are born to a backdrop of adieux.”
― Hélène Cixous

“Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time. Write yourself. Your body must be heard.”
― Helene Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa

“If you're trapped in the dream of the Other, you're fucked.”
― Gilles Deleuze

“Writing has nothing to do with meaning. It has to do with landsurveying and cartography, including the mapping of countries yet to come.”
― Gilles Deleuze

“A concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window.”
― Gilles Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“Forming grammatically correct sentences is for the normal individual the prerequisite for any submission to social laws. No one is supposed to be ignorant of grammaticality; those who are belong in special institutions. The unity of language is fundamentally political.”
― Gilles Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“The shadow escapes from the body like an animal we had been sheltering.”
― Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation

“Shit on your whole mortifying, imaginary, and symbolic theater!”
― Gilles Deleuze, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“Let us create extraordinary words, on condition that they be put to the most ordinary use and that the entity they designate be made to exist in the same way as the most common object.”
― Gilles Deleuze, Dialogues

“There is no such thing as repetition. Only insistance. ”
― Gertrude Stein

“Take care of the sense and the sounds will take care of themselves.”
― Lewis Carroll, The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition

“Walking. I am listening to a deeper way. Suddenly all my ancestors are behind me. Be still, they say. Watch and listen. You are the result of the love of thousands.”
― Linda Hogan

“tears have a purpose. they are what we carry of the ocean, and perhaps we must become the sea, give ourselves to it, if we are to be transformed.”
― Linda Hogan, Solar Storms

“What finally turned me back toward the older traditions of my own [Chickasaw] and other Native peoples was the inhumanity of the Western world, the places--both inside and out--where the culture's knowledge and language don't go, and the despair, even desperation, it has spawned. We live, I see now, by different stories, the Western mind and the indigenous. In the older, more mature cultures where people still live within the kinship circles of animals and human beings there is a connection with animals, not only as food, but as 'powers,' a word which can be taken to mean states of being, gifts, or capabilities.

I've found, too, that the ancient intellectual traditions are not merely about belief, as some would say. Belief is not a strong enough word. They are more than that: They are part of lived experience, the on-going experience of people rooted in centuries-old knowledge that is held deep and strong, knowledge about the natural laws of Earth, from the beginning of creation, and the magnificent terrestrial intelligence still at work, an intelligence now newly called ecology by the Western science that tells us what our oldest tribal stories maintain--the human animal is a relatively new creation here; animal and plant presences were here before us; and we are truly the younger sisters and brothers of the other animal species, not quite as well developed as we thought we were. It is through our relationships with animals and plants that we maintain a way of living, a cultural ethics shaped from an ancient understanding of the world, and this is remembered in stories that are the deepest reflections of our shared lives on Earth.

That we held, and still hold, treaties with the animals and plant species is a known part of tribal culture. The relationship between human people and animals is still alive and resonant in the world, the ancient tellings carried on by a constellation of stories, songs, and ceremonies, all shaped by lived knowledge of the world and its many interwoven, unending relationships. These stories and ceremonies keep open the bridge between one kind of intelligence and another, one species and another.

(from her essay "First People")”
― Linda Hogan, Intimate Nature: The Bond Between Women and Animals