Lithium for Medea Quotes

“Los Angeles, brutal claustrophobic basin of delusion and ripoff, clutter, eerie, sticky, horrible. They came, they saw and wend blind. O hallucination of urban gray slabs. . . . Poor ruined sunsore and sadness for demented City of Angels, of white torment and hideous albino predator birds.”
― Kate Braverman, Lithium for Medea

“Los Angeles. . . . It was some sort of organic ruin, an accident of architecture and brutal necessity. The iridescence was somehow almost legible, suggesting a calligraphy of exposed bone, transparencies, experimental skin grafts. The blood of Los Angeles was a red neon wash, a kind of sea of autistic traffic lights.”
― Kate Braverman, Lithium for Medea

“Los Angeles is like a white world, filled with ever smaller white circles, leading to some perfect white core. Los Angeles is where the angels with their white capped teeth and their white tennis dresses, gradually edged closer to the pure center, ambrosia, the fountain of youth.”
― Kate Braverman, Lithium for Medea

“My father is taking me to my first baseball game. The Philadelphia Athletics are playing. I feel I've been sitting on my strange hard seat for a long time. I stand up. It is the National Anthem.
"I want to go home now," I tell my father.
He is looking down at the big green field. "But the game hasn't started yet," he says.
Then he shrugs. He laughs and his laughter is big like the wind. "O.K., kid. O.K."
And he takes my by the hand and leads me out of the stadium.”
― Kate Braverman, Lithium for Medea

“I’ve always lived here, by the sea. I was a beach brat. I was born riding the peak of a crest of a wave. I was born with salt in my eyes. No, I mean it. I was conceived right down there on that beach. Six years old and surfing. It’s all that sea in me. That’s what makes my eyes change color. I’ve got waves inside. The ocean runs through me, man.”
― Kate Braverman, Lithium for Medea: A Novel

“Without the hard evidence the past becomes infinitely malleable. The past can lose solidity, flow and rush the old banks, erasing and drowning. The past can take the road stones, one by one. And the memory of roads. It occurred to me that even hard evidence might not be anchor enough, not sturdy enough to withstand the flow.”
― Kate Braverman, Lithium for Medea

“I sat down on the side of the canal. Yellow wildflowers rose in thick rows across the vacant field near my house. I sat very still, a part of the landscape, like a rock. In time, the edges of the canals would grind down and the vacant field reach out and push over me. Wild black grapes would grow in my arms. Vines would wrap around my ankles and dirt lick my thighs. In time, I would become a mound on a hill, a place for insects to rest their too thin veined wings.”
― Kate Braverman, Lithium for Medea

“It was simple. A door opened. A crevice was torn in the fabric. Something entered. It stalked. It was a hunter. It was hungry but mindless as a shark. It would take anything. It was enormous.”
― Kate Braverman, Lithium for Medea