Motion Sickness Quotes

“Travel unsettles the appropriate. You’re bound to be inappropriate. Which is probably why I don’t feel the intense embarrassment some do at not being able to speak foreign languages correctly. It seems to me that one of the privileges of travel is never to fit in. And not to fit in, not to be able to, is a kind of freedom. One of the freedoms that money can buy, like buying a hotel room in which one is psychologically unburdened and can act out guilty pleasures, capitalist ones, no doubt.”
― Lynne Tillman, Motion Sickness

“ Compared with Europeans most of us don’t walk around bearing history’s daily weight, even though we’re weight-conscious. We don’t listen to history’s taunts. Even though they’re there. Old news isn’t supposed to linger in our streets or in our homes. We even have less of it, I’d things like history can be weighed and measured that may. Europeans may be size queens. If I defend myself, do I defend my country, as if it and I were the same, which begs the question of how and to what extent these things can be separated. Do I claim the country or does it claim me?" ”
― Lynne Tillman, Motion Sickness

“The rain persists, an amniotic fluid, the perfect environment for reading in a room, a womb of one’s own.”
― Lynne Tillman, Motion Sickness

“Sometimes I think it’s my fate to meet more and more people and that if it weren’t, my life would be less chaotic. Virginia Woolf wrote that books continue each other and it seems to me that people continue each other too, spring ungodlike out of the heads and bodies of others, not clones but continuities, with ties that bind, loosely or closely. Some characters seem to fit better in some scenes than in others, have more to do with the space around them and the actors who preceded their appearance. Of course then there are the discontinuities…”
― Lynne Tillman, Motion Sickness

“I can feel entirely indifferent to the content of what I say. A great postindustrial capitalist ennui engulfs me and sweeps away vestiges of involvement. Leaves me passionless and dissatisfied and incapable of movement. I'm threatened by this constantly. In unfamiliar surroundings, the point is to shift voices. I like shifting voices. Love affairs permit those shifts, and when the lover is shifty, as Zoran might be, the ride is bumpy.”
― Lynne Tillman, Motion Sickness

“Sometimes he's hopeful. He quotes Gransci: Optimism of the will, pessimism of the intellect. I might easily reverse the tow, I say, hoping that he'll enjoy the irony. He lights a cigar and peers at me as if we were sifting at different tables. "A joke?" he asks. "Sure", I say. Not mentioning paralysis of the will, the division of the intellect. "In Haiti" I tell him "there's a saying: When the anthropologists come, the gods leave". "That is too anti-intellctual for me", Zoran says, "but interesting. Anthropology is anyway a nineteen-century problem." "I can't think of one problem that isn't technological that doesn't go back at least to the nineteenth century." "Touche".”
― Lynne Tillman, Motion Sickness

“…but place is unimportant to a traveler, if that’s what I can be called. If it were important, people couldn’t bear to move on.”
― Lynne Tillman, Motion Sickness

“... I want things plain. Or direct. When I read a book I’m suspicious of description. Too much embellishment or an excess of adjectives bothers me, as if the speaker or writer were attempting to overcome me, to finesse me like a bridge player. Or to seduce me.”
― Lynne Tillman, Motion Sickness

“…the tongue, for instance, is privileged with information indifferent to words.”
― Lynne Tillman, Motion Sickness