The Electric Michelangelo Quotes

“People were made up of shit and piss and phlegm and bits and pieces of experience.”
― Sarah Hall, The Electric Michelangelo

“There were times when initial introductions were so vested with something other as to confuse and distract and entrance both parties, Cy would realize later. And only further into their relationships when you knew the person better, and their place in your life became clear, if there was love, if there was hate, if there was deepness of any kind, only then did you understand that the embers of meaning have been present all along and glowing since that first moment you laid eyes on them. As if you already knew them before you came to know them. As if some rift had bent time.”
― Sarah Hall, The Electric Michelangelo

“One thing I will say, they often take it better than a man. Pain, that is. Probably the residue of tolerance from when they were all bloody witches and got stoned or burned or drowned for it, eh lad? Never tell your mother I said that, by the way.”
― Sarah Hall, The Electric Michelangelo

“Blue that was unstable and misbehaved when left in skin. Blue like the sea that had taken his father. Blue, for his mother’s sake, and for the true colour of every bereaved and bloodless heart when it is collapsing.”
― Sarah Hall, The Electric Michelangelo

“Elliot Rawley was a drinker, Cy’s mother had been right. And he was a poor drinker. One that let the demons of the bottle into his head when he tipped it back, demons that went about unloosing all the trouble they could find stashed in the catacombs of his mind. Every tragic thing that had ever happened, every self-doubt, every delusion, freed itself from bondage and revisited him when he drank.”
― Sarah Hall, The Electric Michelangelo

“Those partial to drink were hiding faults and dishonesty. They were sloppy souls, even the ones with pleasant manners and fine noses.”
― Sarah Hall, The Electric Michelangelo

“People went through life like well handled jugs, collecting chips and scrapes and stains from wear and tear, from holding and pouring life.”
― Sarah Hall, The Electric Michelangelo

“The man had added to his body in a way that was brave and timeless and beyond adornment.”
― Sarah Hall, The Electric Michelangelo

“Tattooing was unto itself its very own art form, old as the hills and stranger than time. Whether in rich, far-flung resorts or condemned cottages, glamorous prestige or ragged poverty, human hearts and souls were variable and would always require painting.”
― Sarah Hall, The Electric Michelangelo

“To tattoo was to understand that people in all their confusing mystery wanted only to claim their bodies as their own site, on which to build a beacon, or raise a rafter, or nail up a manifesto, warning, celebrating, telling of themselves. It was to understand that in order for a body to be reborn and re-yoked, first it needed to be destroyed and freed. It was emancipation and it was slavery, the ashes and the phoenix. It was beauty and destruction, it was that old trick. That was the contract.”
― Sarah Hall, The Electric Michelangelo

“These were the moments that defined the city. They were the waking dreams of a never sleeping metropolis.”
― Sarah Hall, The Electric Michelangelo

“a tattoo says more of a fellow looking at it than it can do of the man who’s got it on his back.”
― Sarah Hall, The Electric Michelangelo

“And only further into relationships when you knew the person better, and their place in your life became clear, if there was love, if there was hate, if there was deepness of any kind, only then did you understand that the embers of meaning had been present all along and glowing since that first moment you laid eyes on them. As if you already knew them before you came to know them. As if some rift had bent time.”
― Sarah Hall, The Electric Michelangelo

“Red, brown, yellow, green, black. Five colours to say everything that could be said. And what Cy suddenly wanted, more than anything in the world just then, what he wanted was that missing blue, primary and resistant to the trade. Blue that was unstable and misbehaved when left in skin. Blue like the sea that had taken his father. Blue, for his mother's sake, and for the true colour of every bereaved and bloodless heart when it is collapsing.”
― Sarah Hall, The Electric Michelangelo

“A month in and it seemed to CY that he was an explorer summiting the foothill of an a bizarre and primitive island.”
― Sarah Hall, The Electric Michelangelo

“Like a dog defeated in a frenzied circle by its own tail and slowing and realizing then that the tail it was after all along was already its possession”
― Sarah Hall, The Electric Michelangelo

“Life conspires to plant us in the funniest of gardens where the trees need an especial form of tending”
― Sarah Hall, The Electric Michelangelo

“Over the coun-ter, she might let you mount-her, but in the morning, there’ll be no more whoring, as its off to the doc-ter for warts of your cock-ter”
― Sarah Hall, The Electric Michelangelo