Chelsea Girls Quotes

“If there is something I will always carry in my heart it is this earnest unwillingness to be part of the bunch,”
― Eileen Myles, Chelsea Girls: A Novel

“If the end of one's youth is a thin slice of cheese I ate mine standing in that room. I was there because I was hungry. That's all.”
― Eileen Myles, Chelsea Girls

“I have waited all my life for permission. I feel it growing in my breast. A war is storming and it is behind me and I am moving my forces into light.”
― Eileen Myles (author), Chelsea Girls

“You can’t force a story that doesn’t want to be told.”
― Eileen Myles, Chelsea Girls: A Novel

“Allen Ginsberg asked me to sign his book. I must've stood there for five minutes drawing a complete blank. Hi Allen, from one howl to another. Dear Allen I'm glad you think I'm a poet. Love, Eileen. I'm the only woman you like, right Allen? Only the craziest thoughts passed through my mind. Finally he started getting embarrassed. Just sign it. Come by and write something better when you think of it. I scrawled something. I forget what it was.”
― Eileen Myles, Chelsea Girls

“If boys were always trying to get in girls’ pants, what did they want? What could the girls give them? Pee it seemed to me was an appropriate gift.”
― Eileen Myles, Chelsea Girls: A Novel

“You know how you’re always half hungry while in bed. Well this was like sleeping with a meal, a big fried meal, you have your arms around it.”
― Eileen Myles, Chelsea Girls: A Novel

“I wish I could remember how the days went. I feel like I'm looking through a window at my own past, and if I could just trace it with my fingertips or my breath on it I could see where I've been.”
― Eileen Myles, Chelsea Girls

“Fear of not being understood is the greatest fear I thought lying on the bathroom floor at 11P.M. worse than not pleasing people, worse than anything else I can think of. Worse than being cold or alone. Worse than getting old.”
― Eileen Myles, Chelsea Girls

“You had a couple of Adidas teeshirts. I don’t get it, I said. You said it’s a joke. You kind of shrugged. “I have this funny kind of sense of humor.” It was the exact same shrug you made a split second before you kissed me on the night we became lovers. Colombo was on teevee and we were sitting on a rolled up exercise mat on the floor. The look on your face, my favorite look was here goes. It looked like the smallest decision, like a boat slightly turning but now absolutely going in that direction. I was fixed.”
― Eileen Myles, Chelsea Girls: A Novel

“It’s so easy to give up – to live in dreams with yourself instead of in stories with a friend. I distrust dreams. It’s just your brain re-stirring information uselessly, fending for itself in another dimension, making movies of its own fears and you wake up horrified or calmed by something that never happened or dissatisfied and you go back down for more which is all you get. Dreaming is like getting drunk alone, the less you live the more you dream, the more fantastic and outrageous the dreams get. I bet that’s all dead people do, dream endlessly, and dreams are death in training.”
― Eileen Myles, Chelsea Girls

“Everything I did was something to fix me. With all my heart I was trying to be dead.”
― Eileen Myles (author), Chelsea Girls

“The first time I was in bed with a woman it was also in the morning light and so was the first time Christine had her head between my legs. I was running my tongue along the lips of the cunt of the first woman I had ever had my clothes off with and this is what love felt like. One thing, not two. That was it. With a woman I felt whole, not different. For instance if I wanted to put a finger inside her vagina and she said not that, then I knew that maybe the new room wasn't as big as it felt and it went on from there, being diminished though never ultimately losing its glamour but being bound nonetheless by what each woman told me lesbians don't do. So Mary started fucking me. One finger two finger three fingers. And her face all that strong part coming out, dissolving her prettiness and pale freckles and celtic distance into force. I had really liked the thrusting presence of a man's dick inside of me. What I didn't know what to do with was men. Who would rub their beards against my cunt and up and down my clit for hours and I wondered what was wrong with me it was such a dirty thing. I couldn't get off. Only once or twice. The last man being such a pig that I couldn't believe I was letting him eat my pussy. I had a tremendous orgasm. He laughed. The first woman put her head between my legs and the complete sin, the absolute moment of sex came back and I was all in one piece coming apart. I was willing to sacrifice all for that moment. Even I guess my vagina, that jar. I thought I had to give that up but there was nothing like that at all.”
― Eileen Myles, Chelsea Girls

“Jimmy Schuyler was my new job. Slowly I moved his possessions to the Chelsea from an 8th Avenue flophouse where on the final day among the dry cleaned clothes still in plastic bags, charred bits of poetry on papers, art print books-- I masturbated because it was a filthy and interesting place and he found out because I told one person who told someone else. It's alright dear I don't need anything. Go have fun.”
― Eileen Myles, Chelsea Girls

“I just need to tell this story for me or else I will burst. It's lonely to be alive and never know the whole story. Everyone must walk with that thought. I would like to tell everything once, just my part, because this is my life, not yours.”
― Eileen Myles, Chelsea Girls

“I wonder what anybody thinks about using your own life, the actual words people say to you in the secrecy of love, or separation, or the oblivious moments when they’ve simply torn off an insult and flung it at you and you’re the one who remembers every little word, at least the ones I use and I fling it back in their faces, if not there, then here, sooner or later and they say, “Oh, I can’t believe I said that.”
― Eileen Myles, Chelsea Girls

“I wonder what anybody thinks about using your own life. The actual words people say to you in the secrecy of love or separation or the oblivious moments when they've simply torn off an insult and flung it at you, and you're the one who remembers every little word, at least the ones I use, and I fling it back in their faces. If not there, then here, sooner or later, and they say, "Oh, I can't believe I said that.”
― Eileen Myles, Chelsea Girls

“It's so easy to give up - to live in dreams with yourself instead of in stories with a friend. I distrust dreams. it's just your brain re-stirring information uselessly, fending for itself in another dimension, making movies of its own fears and you wake up horrified or calmed by something that never happened or dissatisfied and you go back down for more which is all you get. Dreaming is like getting drunk alone, the less you live the more you dream, the more fantastic and outrageous the dreams get. I bet that's all dead people do, dream endlessly, and dreams are death in training.”
― Eileen Myles, Chelsea Girls