The Reenactments Quotes

“OUT of that moment Jesus was nailed to his cross flowed our attempts to represent it, to create a narrative that could contain it. Yet the body, hanging there, is still, simply, terrible. Caravaggio’s genius was to paint Jesus with dirty feet, to bring him back down to earth.”
― Nick Flynn, The Reenactments

“My friend asked me if it had been cathartic, to write my memoir. I looked down at the sculptures—it was cathartic for me to look at them, but I could imagine it might have been hell to make them (I was cheered / when I came first to know / that there were flowers also / in hell). No, I answered—how was it for you to read it? Aristotle, in his Poetics, never promised catharsis for the makers of art, only for the audience.”
― Nick Flynn, The Reenactments

“it is the emptiness of the bowl that creates the bowl”
― Nick Flynn, The Reenactments

“IN Incognito the neuroscientist David Eagleman proposes that we are unknown to ourselves: Most of what we do and think and feel is not under our conscious control.”
― Nick Flynn, The Reenactments: A Memoir