The Vivisectors Quotes

“[B]ecause I knew that despite everything that had happened the thing I still did best was act the audience.”
― Missouri Williams, The Vivisectors

“Editing is so vacant that it’s almost holy. You’re not supposed to bring any of yourself to the text in front of you; instead, you are meant to be the conduit for a great and impersonal ideal, something like objectivity. Or rather it is that editing requires a focusing of attention so absolute that it makes your personhood into even more of a hindrance than usual. You have to erase yourself in service of another person or what you imagine their intentions to be.”
― Missouri Williams, The Vivisectors

“I admired the decay of the house and the city around it but I feared the decay of the body without ever really understanding why.”
― Missouri Williams, The Vivisectors

“But being in pain has never bothered me. I have always been able to control my impulses.”
― Missouri Williams, The Vivisectors

“She was overflowing with emptiness, like a glass full of foam, and this, she said, was the source of all her problems. It was what compelled her to eat in the way that she did, which was excessively, and ensured that every single effort to rectify the problem failed. Every deficiency of the body is matched by a deficiency of the soul.”
― Missouri Williams, The Vivisectors