MacArthur Park Quotes

“We knew something about one another, sure, that we belonged to the same tribe, the markings of which were always visible to those who belong, even if they were invisible to outsiders.”
― Andrew Durbin, MacArthur Park

“Is it a novel?” “I don’t know. I guess so. Then again no. It’s like an essay that looks like a novel.”
― Andrew Durbin, MacArthur Park

“My book had a shape, an arc—though I was still incapable of describing what that arc plotted or argued for. As a collection of texts, it moved between poetry and fiction, between Los Angeles and New York. The book struggled, self-consciously, with narrative: how to put the things that made up my life, but also the lives of others, into the form of a story.”
― Andrew Durbin, MacArthur Park

“All fiction is about writing.”
― Andrew Durbin, MacArthur Park

“The art world is an unregulated economy that borrows from other economies—theory, poetry, and scientific research, in this case—to continually update its relationship to the world and, in acting as a conduit for other (and all) disciplines, strives to become the clearest image of the world in which we may better see ourselves.”
― Andrew Durbin, MacArthur Park

“Behind the toilet, a sculpture of a penis urinated into a bowl after you flushed. Too much cock.”
― Andrew Durbin, MacArthur Park

“I nodded—I liked Tom of Finland, but I’d never thought of his work as utopian, as being part of any utopia I’d wanted to live in, though our differences were plotted so far apart on the timeline that bound us that I conceded that post-Stonewall, post-AIDS-crisis, my position was rather cushy and I could do whatever I wanted and no one cared, it was already on tv and the internet anyway.”
― Andrew Durbin, MacArthur Park

“Most subjects want to shape your view of them, of course.”
― Andrew Durbin, MacArthur Park

“California is the end of an arc constructed over the dead who resisted it: all dreams, especially the terrible promise of an American one, seek a port, a jumping-off place, palms, ocean, a final stop. Do you fall back in earnest on the pop adage that anything is possible here? Come, and disappear.”
― Andrew Durbin, MacArthur Park

“If LA goes, Hollywood goes. Disaster films about LA (all great disaster films are about LA) are the entertainment that imagines a spectacular end to itself, a totalizing destruction not only of a place but of the medium, outsizing the US’s doomsy anxiety about its future in the post-war to include one of its most popular industries.”
― Andrew Durbin, MacArthur Park

“The community of Fire Island is such that you take your place in it for granted, trust that no matter what happens or who it happens with, you will find your way back.”
― Andrew Durbin, MacArthur Park

“On Fire Island, you drifted, floated in a lazy river of other people’s pheromones and bodily fluids, toward whatever house or cock or ass or what, whatever you wanted, that the current brought you to.”
― Andrew Durbin, MacArthur Park

“Crisis gives us shape, the contours of sympathetic form, whether we call it forth or not, whether or not it happened to us as we claim—or remember—it did.”
― Andrew Durbin, MacArthur Park

“He was a monk in an order of one.”
― Andrew Durbin, MacArthur Park

“He called me “darling” in that obnoxious way gay men sometimes do.”
― Andrew Durbin, MacArthur Park

“We were not so great at what we did—or at least I wasn’t—and I liked it that way: that no one seemed to care about the quality of any of this, any measurable greatness. We were tiny people, but our tininess was at times formidable.”
― Andrew Durbin, MacArthur Park

“I was a writer, after all. Shouldn’t I have a book?”
― Andrew Durbin, MacArthur Park

“How do you calculate loss, as in the loss of place, encompassing those whose “investment” in their home was not simply economic but who had nowhere else to go? How do you calculate the loss of a place, not only its real geography but the geography of its imagination?”
― Andrew Durbin, MacArthur Park

“A catastrophe is an opportunity.”
― Andrew Durbin, MacArthur Park

“What a story this place will tell,” she said.”
― Andrew Durbin, MacArthur Park