Michelle P > Michelle's Quotes

“Peckinpah gives the final shoot-out in which they all die a kind of orgasmic rush that releases all of us from the cinematic or, more accurately, the American fantasy that we will survive no matter what.”
― Claudia Rankine, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric

“When my husband died, because he was so famous and known for not being a believer, many people would come up to me-it still sometimes happens-and ask me if Carl changed at the end and converted to a belief in an afterlife. They also frequently ask me if I think I will see him again. Carl faced his death with unflagging courage and never sought refuge in illusions. The tragedy was that we knew we would never see each other again. I don't ever expect to be reunited with Carl. But, the great thing is that when we were together, for nearly twenty years, we lived with a vivid appreciation of how brief and precious life is. We never trivialized the meaning of death by pretending it was anything other than a final parting. Every single moment that we were alive and we were together was miraculous-not miraculous in the sense of inexplicable or supernatural. We knew we were beneficiaries of chance. . . . That pure chance could be so generous and so kind. . . . That we could find each other, as Carl wrote so beautifully in Cosmos, you know, in the vastness of space and the immensity of time. . . . That we could be together for twenty years. That is something which sustains me and it’s much more meaningful. . . . The way he treated me and the way I treated him, the way we took care of each other and our family, while he lived. That is so much more important than the idea I will see him someday. I don't think I'll ever see Carl again. But I saw him. We saw each other. We found each other in the cosmos, and that was wonderful.”
― Ann Druyan

“Let me rage before I die.”
― Virgil, The Aeneid

“I always think that I’m still this 13-year old boy that doesn’t really know how to be an adult, pretending to live my life, taking notes for when I’ll really have to do it.”
― Richard Linklater, Before Sunrise

“The master’s room was wide open. The master’s room was brilliantly lighted, and the master was there, very calm . . . and our people stopped dead . . . it was the master . . . I went in. “It’s you,” he said, very calm. It was I, even I, and I told him so, the good slave, the faithful slave, the slave of slaves, and suddenly his eyes were like two cockroaches, frightened in the rainy season . . . I struck, and the blood spurted; that is the only baptism that I remember today. —Aimé Césaire excerpted in Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, Black Panther Party booklist”
― Joshua Bloom, Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party

“To give a person an opinion one must first judge well whether that person is of the disposition to receive it or not.”
― Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai

“How does distance look?” is a simple direct question. It extends from a spaceless within to the edge of what can be loved.”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

“Geryon watched the top of Herakles’ head and felt his limits returning. Nothing to say. Nothing.”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

“In Geryon’s autobiography this page has a photograph of some red rabbit giggle tied with a white ribbon. He has titled it “Jealous of My Little Sensations.”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

“Water! Out from between two crouching masses of the world the word leapt. ———— It was raining on his face. He forgot for a moment that he was a brokenheart then he remembered. Sick lurch downward to Geryon trapped in his own bad apple. Each morning a shock to return to the cut soul.”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

“At what point does one say of a man that he has become unreal? He hugged his overcoat closer and tried to assemble in his mind Heidegger’s argument about the use of moods. We would think ourselves continuous with the world if we did not have moods. It is state-of-mind that discloses to us (Heidegger claims) that we are beings who have been thrown into something else.”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

“Three ancient musicians hunched there— piano, guitar, accordion. None of them looked less than seventy years old, the accordion player so frail each time he swayed his shoulders around a corner of the melody Geryon feared the accordion would crush him flat. It gradually became clear that nothing could crush this man. Hardly glancing at one another the three of them played as one person, in a state of pure discovery. They tore clear and clicked and locked and unlocked, they shot their eyebrows up and down. They leaned together and wove apart, they rose and cut away and stalked one another and flew up in a cloud and sank back down on waves.”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

“Would this day never end? His eye traveled to the clock at the front of the room and he fell into the pool of his favorite question.”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

“The Butcher's egoless brutality, hammered linear by what she could not know, less than primitive, was for all its horror, still human. Though bloody handed, he was safer than the precision of the world linguistically corrected...Jebel's cruelties, kindnesses, existed in the articulate limits of civilization. But this red bestiality - fascinated her!”
― Samuel R. Delany, Babel-17

“Neurotics, proceed with delusions of grandeur. Napoleon Bonaparte, take the lead. Jesus Christ, bring up the rear. Simulate severe depression. Non-communicative with repressed hostility.”
― Samuel R. Delany, Babel-17

“Well, most textbooks say language is a mechanism for expressing thought. But language is thought. Thought is information given form. The form is language.”
― Samuel R. Delany, Babel-17

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“All the misunderstandings that tie the world up and keep people apart were quivering before me at once, waiting for me to untangle them, explain them, and I couldn’t. I didn’t know the words, the grammar, the syntax.”
― Samuel R. Delany, Babel-17

“The whole mechanism of guilt as a deterrent to right action is just as much a linguistic fault.”
― Samuel R. Delany, Babel-17

“Yo no hablo de venganzas ni perdones, el olvido es la única venganza y el único perdón.”
― Borges

“After departure, only invisible things are left, perhaps the life of the world is held together by invisible chains of memory and loss and love. So many things, so many people, depart! And we can only repossess them in our minds.”
― James Baldwin, Going to Meet the Man

“Irimiás: God is not made manifest in language, you dope. He's not manifest in anything. He doesn't exist... God was a mistake. I've long understood there is zero difference between me and a bug, or a bug and a river, or a river and a voice shouting above it. There's no sense or meaning in anything. It's nothing but a network of dependency under enormous fluctuating pressures. It's only our imaginations, not our senses, that continually confront us with failure and the false belief that we can raise ourselves by our own bootstraps from the miserable pulp of delay. There's no escaping that, stupid.”
― László Krasznahorkai, Satantango

“As a child, my number one best friend was the librarian in my grade school. I actually believed all those books belonged to her.”
― Erma Bombeck

“When anxiety about the body runs deeply enough, adherence to the rules - don’t eat, keep the mouth shut, pack up the butane-powered curling iron, starve yourself half crazy - comes to feel voluntary, the mandates self-generated and freely embraced.”
― Caroline Knapp (Author)

“So much of this is waved away as female vanity - this tedious nattering about calories and fat - but I find it poignant and painful in a low-level but chronic way…Hidden within that exchange is an entire set of mathematical principles, equations that can dictate a woman’s most fundamental approach to hunger. Mastery over the body - its impulses, its needs, its size - is paramount; to lose control is to risk beauty, and to risk beauty is to risk desirability and to risk desirability is to risk entitlement to sexuality and love and self-esteem.”
― Caroline Knapp (Author)

“No one is going to tell you who to marry, or what career to pursue, or how to cut your hair, and so you're thrown back on yourself. The freedom to chose, in other words, means the freedom to make mistakes, to falter and fail, to come face-to-face with your own flaws and limitations and fears and secrets, to live with the terrible uncertainty that necessarily attends to the construction of the self. This, I think, is the steady pulse of agitation behind an unsettled appetite, this wobbling, reaching anxiety, which craves relief, stalks it, hunts it down in tangible forms: Eat the cake, which will assuage some internal emptiness; buy that jacket, which will cloak you in an identity; call that man, who will define and give shape to your life.”
― Caroline Knapp (Author)

“The tough part, of course, have to do with finding love, and then taking that sledgehammer and breaking out of the box long enough to hold onto it, which in itself is no small feat. That job involves naming desires, and it involves understanding what stands in its way, and it involves mustering the strength and courage and self-acceptance to smash through the constraints, consequences be damned. The key - the bridge to the shore - is agency, a feeling (almost always hard-won) that marries entitlement with power: I deserve to be filled becomes I can be filled, I can make it happen.”
― Caroline Knapp (Author)

“And as any good feminist economist will tell you, the deflecting power of consumerism has a long and well-earned reputation for serving men, and serving them quite effectively: They control the marketplace, and they permit women to be in charge of the goods, an activity that fills up lots of time, steers energy in limited and specific directions (toward decorating, adorning, pleasing the eye), and also has marvelously mind-numbing effect.”
― Caroline Knapp (Author), Appetites: Why Women Want