The Narrator Quotes

“Sometimes I lie awake and hear noises in the house, and despite myself I’m frightened. Then I hear some familiar sound—a clock strikes, or a train whistles somewhere—and my fear abates. But why should those sounds comfort me, and others frighten me? Why couldn’t a ghost make the sound of a train?”
― Michael Cisco, The Narrator

“I learned always to avoid glorious campaigns—everyone is more likely to die in glorious campaigns.”
― Michael Cisco, The Narrator

“But above all there is speech, incessant speaking, where the inflated edges of the tube are stretched and contracted, knotted and unknotted, ripped open or pressed shut, flued and drummed, hammered and gnawed. Licked.”
― Michael Cisco, The Narrator

“So much strain and muscular labor involved in absorbing food. I’m exhausted just watching it. But above all there is speech, incessant speaking, where the inflated edges of the tube are stretched and contracted, knotted and unknotted, ripped open or pressed shut, flued and drummed, hammered and gnawed. Licked. That tube has two ends. To the far end goes all ignominy, and to the fore end all the glory, hymns of praise. Her lips were lovely. The swollen ring at one end of the tube, fastened to rings and riggings of muscle. All these sounds. It’s exhausting. I notice the upper jaw doesn’t move at all, only the lower. You see the skull so clearly I wonder people don’t think of death whenever they witness speech, or speak themselves, feeling that hinge flap up and down, and even back and forth a bit—how can it go back and forth? Is the socket that loose, or is it something else, like a leather hinge, like a book binding?”
― Michael Cisco, The Narrator

“With great profundity I note the pleasure one gets or takes in pushing wheeled objects, as opposed to the depression involved in pulling them.”
― Michael Cisco, The Narrator

“Why is the station so far out of the city limits anyway? Most likely a collusion between the builders of stations and the builders of long roads.”
― Michael Cisco, The Narrator

“I could say she looks like da Vinci’s “Lady with Ermine” if there had ever been such a thing.”
― Michael Cisco, The Narrator

“I was told, or read, that everyone visits Veciofeni’s cave sooner or later. He stood in there and wept himself to death, evidently, and this manner of dying, so gently incremental, brought about the perfect preservation of his body as a consequence of his mummy-like dehydration and the saturation of his person with his own lachrymal salt.”
― Michael Cisco, The Narrator

“The trembling stars shout down to me, and the life that is in me shouts back. That I know I’m living goes up levels in me like surf rising against the tide marks.”
― Michael Cisco, The Narrator

“I shake with seizure hysterics panic, I'm moving on all my limbs through bullets dying blood and pain they don't stop they run in among each other killing firing their rifles not a foot away from each other shooting as they are shot all eyes white, white, white.”
― Michael Cisco, The Narrator