HERmione Quotes

“Words were her plague and words were her redemption.”
― Hilda Doolittle, HERmione

“Writing. Love is writing.”
― Hilda Doolittle, HERmione

“There's a black rose growing in your garden.”
― H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), HERmione

“You can't live on nothing." "I can live on sunlight falling across little bridges. I can live on the Botticelli-blue cornflower pattern on the out-billowing garments of the attendant to Aphrodite and the pattern of strawberry blossoms and the little daisies in the robe of Primavera. I can live on the doves flying (he says) in cohorts from the underside of the faded gilt of the balcony of Saint Mark's cathedral and the long corridors of the Pitti Palace. I can gorge myself on Rome and the naked Bacchus and the face like a blasted lightning-blasted white birch that is some sort of Fury.”
― Hilda Doolittle, HERmione

“We're incandescent and it doesn't seem fair." "Fair?" "I mean too much comes to some of us, not enought to all the rest of us. So few of us to do the thinking. I mean so few of us have to be so incandescent.”
― Hilda Doolittle, HERmione

“The thing she realised in that moment, that fraction of waiting, was lost. Nothing could bring the thing back, no words could make the thing solid and visible and therefore to be coped with. Solid and visible form was what she had been seeking. I will put this into visible language.”
― H.D., HERmione

“Some plants, some small water creatures give a sort of jellyfish sort of birth by breaking apart, by separating themselves from themselves.”
― H.D., HERmione

“I have tasted words, I have seen them. Never had her hands reached out in darkness and felt the texture of pure marble, never had her forehead bent forward and, as against a stone altar, felt safety. I am now saved. Her mind could not then so specifically have seen it, could not have said, "Now I will reveal myself in words, words may now supercede a scheme of mathematical-biological definition. Words may be my heritage and with words...A lady will be set back in the sky....there was hope in a block of unsubstantiated marble, words could carve and set up solid altars...Thought followed the wing that beat its silver into seven-branched larch boughs.”
― H.D., HERmione

“She didn't know that all her life would be spent gambling with the stark rigidity of words, words that were coin: save, spend and all the time George with his own counter had found her a way out.”
― H.D., HERmione

“Nothing held her, she was nothing holding to this thing: I am Hermione Gart, a failure.”
― H.D., HERmione

“I am not Undine for Undine or the Little Mermaid sold her glory for feet. Undine (or the Little Mermaid) couldn't speak after she sold her glory. I will not sell my glory.”
― H.D., HERmione

“run run run Hermione. You have in your hands a message and a token...run and run and run and run Hermione. You know running and running and running that the messenger will take (lampadephoros) your message in its fervour and you will sink down exhausted...run,run, Hermione. For the message-bearer next in line has turned against you...dead, dead or forgotten. Hecate at crossroads, a destruction...”
― H.D., HERmione

“She wanted George with some uncorrelated sector of Her Gart, she wanted George to correlate for her, life here, there. She wanted George to define and to make definable a mirage, a reflection of some lost incarnation, a wood maniac, a tree demon, a neuropathic dendrophile...She wanted George to make the thing an integral, herself integrity. She wanted George to make one of his drastic statements that would dynamite her world away for her. She wanted this, but even as she wanted it she let herself sink further, further, she saw that her two hands reached toward George like the hands of a drowned girl. She knew she was not drowned. Where others would drown-lost, suffocated in this element-she knew that she lived. She had no complete right yet to this element, hands struggled to be pulled out. White hands waved above the water like sea spume or inland-growing pond flowers...She wanted George to pull her out, she wanted George to push her in, let Her be drowned utterly.”
― H.D., HERmione

“Hermione looked far and far and George was a midge and a leaf was the size of a house and an acorn-cup would shelter herself...for...I am a tree planted by the river of water...I am in the word tree. I am tree exactly.”
― H.D., HERmione

“All your life will retain one or two bits of colour with which all your life will be violently or delicately tinted.”
― H.D., HERmione

“She knew herself the heart of a king buried in a sepulchre (in the land of his love) while the body of the king is elsewhere. My heart lies buried in there like Coeur de Lion (or whoever it was) who had his heart buried at Havre (or wherever it was) and the rest of him buried somewhere else.”
― H.D., HERmione

“There was a zone she had not explored. She could use the same counter, the same sort of password that she used with all these people, but she had passed over in the twinkling of an eye into another forest. This forest was reality. There, the very speaking of the words, conjured up answering sigil, house and barn and terrace and castle and river and little plum tree. A whole world was open. She looked in through a wide doorway.”
― H.D., HERmione

“I'm tired of not talking. It seems I have never talked. I want to talk and talk forever.”
― H.D., HERmione

“That odd infallible sliding-like-crystal air on water that means day's left dawn for morning.”
― H.D., HERmione

“People don't want to marry me. People want to marry me. I don't want to marry people." She concluded, "One has to do something.”
― H.D., HERmione

“For how could they live then in that uncharted wilderness? The mind must have its landmarks. Theirs were false ones.”
― H.D., HERmione

“Throw out a little word, that was tact; tact is throwing out a little word and the thing goes on and the thing goes on.”
― H.D., HERmione

“The mind of Her Gart was a patchwork of indefinable association.”
― H.D., HERmione