Kutalp (Kutalp!) > Kutalp's Quotes

“As for myself, I used to think it didn't put her in the best of lights for her to be going around being heard looking like somebody saying things like that.”
― Gordon Lish, Collected Fictions

“I sang the way I still talk.
Every song was the worst way I could think of to ask for what I did not yet know how not to want.”
― Garielle Lutz, Stories in the Worst Way

“The day in April when Dr McKnight came to me to bid me goodbye, he made me promise to say a true thing to take a certain prominence among the lies by which my being among others made my being among them manageable for me.”
― Gordon Lish, White Plains: Pieces & Witherlings

“All my life I have never known what to do with my hands.
Except for shit like this.”
― Gordon Lish, Collected Fictions

“Off-load it all.
The whole sludgy gob of it.
Apropos of which, here's the first bit of it.
"Consider yourself kissed."
So how do you like it?—"Consider yourself kissed."
It's what my mother used to say to my sister.
Which is maybe why my sister once woke up once and then went ahead and swallowed more sleeping pills than I guess she guessed she was ever going to be able ever again to ever wake up from.”
― Gordon Lish, Collected Fictions

“I had wanted to be amazing. I wanted to be so amazing. I had already been amazing up to a certain point. I wanted to go past that point. I wanted to be more amazing than I had been up to that point. I wanted to do something which went beyond that point and which went beyond every other point and which people would look at and say that this was something which went beyond all other points and which no other boy would ever be able to go beyond, that I was the only boy who could, that I was the only one.”
― Gordon Lish, What I Know So Far: Stories

“He came to chat with me the day of my being discharged, advising that I not stay at the dog fight until the last dog was dead. I was a kid and made little counsel. Now that I am a bigger kid, I see the value--belatedly--added. Yet I also see the loss of life in the protecting, first of all, of oneself. Better to give oneself away. Dead f*ck the dog and so on.”
― Gordon Lish

“There were different ways we did not come into our own.
We were warm-armed, hot-handed girls. Our palms burned. We made fists around ice cubes, or squeezed anything else frozen—boxes of vegetables, foiled cuts of meat. When they thawed, we exiled them to the freezer again, reached for whatever had collected a fresh crust of frost.”
― Garielle Lutz, Stories in the Worst Way

“We had the same oily skin, dripping and dark. We were warned never to let our hands land on our cheeks or our foreheads, told that our blotting fingerpads would make things only worse. By the end of the day, our faces would appear to be entirely behind water. It was just the rain combing back out of us, we were told. By morning, the pillowcases would be moist with our heatdrops.”
― Garielle Lutz, Stories in the Worst Way

“One day, we were led into a high-ceilinged room and told that everything had already been done for us, that nothing had been spared or held back, that we had been born for no reason other than for hair to have an extra place to grow in the world. A hand pointed to the wide route the hair was already starting to take down our calves. If you cut it, we were told, it will come back. It will haunt.”
― Garielle Lutz, Stories in the Worst Way

“She would've been a good woman," said The Misfit, "if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”
― Flannery O'Connor, A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories

“And for the rest of her life, the girl, the woman, she never made a mark on anyone either that proved anything absolutely for certain, that she could ever see, about what she had done at any time, and this does not break her heart.

"Cloud”
― Diane Williams