Heroines Quotes

“I am beginning to realize that taking the self out of our essays is a form of repression. Taking the self out feels like obeying a gag order--pretending an objectivity where there is nothing objective about the experience of confronting and engaging with and swooning over literature.”
― Kate Zambreno, Heroines

“I wake up and read although Nietzsche says that’s foolish. A sort of narcotic, reading. I read with my hands down the front of my pants—my mode of reading is masturbatory. Sometimes I feel guilty about my lubed fingers all over library books.”
― Kate Zambreno, Heroines

“Sometimes I feel I am living with the Enemy. Sometimes I know I am living with the Enemy.”
― Kate Zambreno, Heroines

“The threat of the femme fatale lingering through modernist texts. All the dark ladies of "The Waste Land," wounding the impotent Fisher King. She is an excessive, castrating presence, threatening to sweep the subject up into sudden hysteria. Fitzgerald's baby vamps and society vampires, the fast girl who kisses (the real danger is her mouth, Zelda's mouth was selected in her high school composite of prettiest girl). Mythologizing the lives (wives) that catalyzed them. A DeKooning horror: FEMME. He who immortalized her in leatherbound.”
― Kate Zambreno, Heroines

“In This Sex which is Not One Luce Irigaray asks: "Does Woman have an unconscious or is the unconscious?"

She who represents a primitive myth, something of the unrepressed past. Blank, you can project anything onto her.”
― Kate Zambreno, Heroines

“Vivien(ne) is depicted so often as the femme fatale, the black widow, the vampire.

Yet Tom seems bolder, more vital, more alive as she declines, Jaunty in top hat and cane outside Faber & Gwyer.”
― Kate Zambreno, Heroines

“It's difficult not to read Vivien(ne) as this pathetic spectacle of illness and dependence. The ultimate grotesque of femininity, like Freud's hysteric/housewife (both Dora and her mother). But channeling her, imagining an interior life, I can sense her early inner spirit and see it squelched and doomed into sickness and submission. Under different circumstances and with more strength and less of a mother who crafted her as an invalid from childhood., she could have been an author. Maybe.”
― Kate Zambreno, Heroines

“My femme fatales, my deadly women, so often left to die.”
― Kate Zambreno, Heroines

“(But does her writing transcend therapy? who is to judge? and who decides? Cannot a piece of writing also be a personal exorcism? Was not "The Waste Land" itself a form of personal exorcism)”
― Kate Zambreno, Heroines

“To become so possessed by a character you begin to play the part. A sort of Method Acting that is also a conjuring up. Jean Rhys POSSESSED by Bertha, who she first calls Antoinette Cosway. In the novel Rhys unravels what led to her being renamed, being destroyed, going mad, madness in her novel as the death of self.”
― Kate Zambreno, Heroines

“If you are a woman—the flames are seen as too close. The flames of Virginia Woolf.”
― Kate Zambreno, Heroines

“If Molly Brown was a real woman writer, she would probably be dismissed as mad and unnecessarily pathologized. We glorify our male literary hysterics who often channel women and condemn our female literary hysterics. They can play women, fetishize her excesses. Make fun of her frivolity. They don't have to be women. A colonizing or appropriating of the feminine.”
― Kate Zambreno, Heroines

“She is bleeding Ophelia, not a tortured Hamlet.”
― Kate Zambreno, Heroines

“This idea that one must control oneself and stop being so FULL of self remains a dominating theory around mental illness, and, perhaps tellingly, around other patriarchal laws and narratives (…)”
― Kate Zambreno, Heroines

“Eliot was exquisitely sensitive to noise.
She was exquisitely sensitive.”
― Kate Zambreno, Heroines

“Every year the memory vomits up again, especially after every move. Love of our kind requires so much amnesia. Despite his eternal apologies. Despite how far we’ve come, how we’ve both changed, grown, our bond strengthened, one of now mutual respect, constant communication. For I love him yes I love him but ours is not a romantic tale of origins. Of how we came to be.”
― Kate Zambreno, Heroines

“She was supposed to fuck a god high up on his mountaintop, but she refused. She wouldn’t listen to Apollo’s reasoning. So he cursed her, a life sentence. He said, Sure, you can live forever, as many grains of sand in your hand, but that young lovely body will be gone, you will wrinkle up into nothingness. Who will love you now? Who will listen?   Eventually”
― Kate Zambreno, Heroines