Certain Magical Acts Quotes

“I want to go back to where I once lived,
but it isn't there anymore; that one of me
isn't here.”
― Alice Notley, Certain Magical Acts

“The patient, genderless, bodiless, will tell me of its anguish: I feel like an old, opaque secret. I keep asking to be renewed. I suck on every fad, like mushrooms on a cemetery slab. Everyone’s better than I am; I’m the imprisoned best. No one loves another except as a mirror to a musty guest, to take stingy control. We are all failing, masterfully, because we desire it. Want to see civilizations ruined, want to see our species’ death, our psychic embroidery unraveled. We want to find out who’s left, the impossible perceiver of our demise. I’m hungry, I’m sick, I’m wounded. No shirt. So tired. I want to go home. They’re killing us; can’t remember childhood. The animal, bloodied, fails to hunt again. Our genocides are a cliché, repeated, but there’s no satiety, and further horror is willed. Who will save you? Who wants to be saved . . . I didn’t mean to say . . . I didn’t mean to be born.”
― Alice Notley, Certain Magical Acts

“I'm the one who has no
small feelings”
― Alice Notley, Certain Magical Acts

“If you remember better times
you know they were lies, because they led
to this”
― Alice Notley, Certain Magical Acts

“Emotion isn't really what I felt . . .

Living, one is so detached.”
― Alice Notley, Certain Magical Acts

“I can no longer find any
rationale for living. My life is as small as a firefly's.
I am always uncomfortable; often I suffer.”
― Alice Notley, Certain Magical Acts

“I am the being that heals by being incontrovertible. The one who is joyous. I am the one here, the very one. I am the being you can’t go back on; I am the being who fills your death; the one you have no obligation to. I am the being you, the healed, have become. The patient says, I see my past drifting away.”
― Alice Notley, Certain Magical Acts

“cry out with me turn on the lights”
― Alice Notley, Certain Magical Acts

“somewhere you know but never quite remember”
― Alice Notley, Certain Magical Acts

“we can laugh at it sorrowfully”
― Alice Notley, Certain Magical Acts

“for everything I am is my mind, that never leaves me.”
― Alice Notley, Certain Magical Acts

“We were ALways in this other time.”
― Alice Notley, Certain Magical Acts

“But there's a pain in lack of reasons.”
― Alice Notley, Certain Magical Acts

“I don't know how to be . . . an-
ything but empty.”
― Alice Notley, Certain Magical Acts

“She starts to get used to being sacrificed”
― Alice Notley, Certain Magical Acts

“I only remember that it all hurt.”
― Alice Notley, Certain Magical Acts

“I could have stayed out of this one; I didn't.”
― Alice Notley, Certain Magical Acts

“I don't want this part where I don't know if I've dreamed it or not.”
― Alice Notley, Certain Magical Acts

“There are several kinds
of time going on at the same time.”
― Alice Notley, Certain Magical Acts

“in the telepathy of dreams
TALK TO ME”
― Alice Notley, Certain Magical Acts

“You were sick, so sick, with your wound of thwarted longing”
― Alice Notley, Certain Magical Acts

“You return here at night when you dream. A part
of your waking self remains”
― Alice Notley, Certain Magical Acts

“you stepped
outside time to find me. But you are the inventor of time
and you will go back.”
― Alice Notley, Certain Magical Acts

“I am the being within you, outside time and unhaunted.”
― Alice Notley, Certain Magical Acts

“Your thoughts have given up, finally.”
― Alice Notley, Certain Magical Acts

“Your phantasmagoric
wound has closed.”
― Alice Notley, Certain Magical Acts

“I have no hope then? the patient asks. There is no hope
or change. Have I not changed? the patient asks. How
could anything so empty change?”
― Alice Notley, Certain Magical Acts

“This clearing is full of false lights, flickers that stop
when you look.”
― Alice Notley, Certain Magical Acts

“I
hear the noise of your thinking; but I don't listen.
Your thoughts wouldn't bear remembering.”
― Alice Notley, Certain Magical Acts

“Are you in pain, my darling? There's no pain here but
the psychic; you're afloat in a blood-sticky unuttered scream.”
― Alice Notley, Certain Magical Acts