The Complete Madame Realism and Other Stories Quotes

“Once history holds your hand, it never lets go. But it has an anxious grip and takes you places you couldn’t expect.”
― Lynne Tillman, The Complete Madame Realism and Other Stories

“We do not select the stories we write, we do not pick the voices. They take us by surprise and we surrender to them. They write us, they write in us, all over us, through us. They occupy us. We are, in a sense, puppets--to language, with language.”
― Lynne Tillman, The Complete Madame Realism and Other Stories

“Faced with the unfamiliar, we the public have been trained to rely on museums, like schools, to serve up art and culture like pieces of pie: little wedges of esthetics, criticism, politics and history.”
― Lynne Tillman, The Complete Madame Realism and Other Stories

“Courage in an artist or writer is different from the courage of firefighters, who rescue people and risk their own lives. Artistic courage might be conceptualized as an internal drama about overcoming rules or inhibitions, dicta of all kinds, the art a manifestation or result of a multitude of processes.”
― Lynne Tillman, The Complete Madame Realism and Other Stories

“Estranged mountains bulged under the sky, the big sky, the endless sky. Anyway, no one could see an end to it, which reassured her, since so much seemed to be coming to an end. It felt that way.

But it seemed impossible---the universe dropping off, ending, there would be an end, and then there would be nothing, a no more, a vacuum of no more. Her imagination couldn’t let her go there.”
― Lynne Tillman, The Complete Madame Realism and Other Stories

“The television was on. It had been on for hours. Years. It was there. TV on demand, a great freedom. Hadn’t Burroughs said there was more freedom today than ever before. Wasn’t that like saying things were more like today than they’ve ever been.”
― Lynne Tillman, The Complete Madame Realism and Other Stories