Girls Against God Quotes

“No one asks me why I hate, no one uses that word, they call me grumpy, not even angry, but grumpy, six letters, something inconsequential and self-inflicted, something powerless, insignificant, something small in a small person, not something that's about society, or about them, just something that means i'm ruining things for myself, something that's in the way of my potential as an object.”
― Jenny Hval, Girls Against God

“I don’t desire total freedom, or total misanthropy. Do you get that? I desire magic, the same alchemical reaction that transforms hatred to a new or strange form of love.”
— Jenny Hval, Girls Against God”
― Jenny Hval, Girls Against God

“Why should you not question, not doubt or go forth in chaos, not scream or bark or howl? You have to open up to the strange. You have to say something new.”
― Jenny Hval, Girls Against God

“What is it we're lacking if we, in art and in life, just repeat and repeat and repair and repair versions of ancient hierarchies and rituals? What do we exclude? Can you hear it? What is it we're still not saying?”
― Jenny Hval, Girls Against God

“I enjoy the burning sensation of shame, when your cheeks swell and glow in the hot fire of exclusion.”
― Jenny Hval, Girls Against God

“Their history is a long chain of disappearances, erasures and reconstructions. There are so many reasons not to exist here, or not to exist completely.”
― Jenny Hval, Girls Against God: A Novel

“It's 1992, and I'm the Gloomiest Child Queen.”
― Jenny Hval, Girls Against God

“Women’s work becomes a crucial problem within capitalism because reproduction is seen as nonwork. Reproduction as mystery isn’t new, but in capitalist rhetoric the mystery surrounding reproduction is redefined in economic terms, so that childbearing becomes not necessary but personal, a private rather than public concern, something that ‘belongs behind closed doors’, not labour performed but a ‘natural resource’ (making women generally ‘natural resources,’ too).”
― Jenny Hval, Girls Against God

“But maybe the girl from Puberty, and all naked young women in all paintings, are actually sitting there hating. Hating the painter, hating their boring gloomy life, hating the king and the president and the bishop and the prime minister and the authors and society and their own place in it. Maybe it’s not a shadow climbing the wall behind her, but smoke from the spontaneously ignited occult fire of hatred.

I’m struck by the naive notion of taking the girl home, painting clothes on her, black clothes maybe, painting her into a new framework, as the Canadian writer Aritha van Herk does to Anna Karenina in Places Far from Ellesmere. In this book, van Herk wants to save Anna from being another woman character in literary history who’s crushed by a train, and she plucks Anna from Tolstoy’s novel and gives her a new frame, a new text. She demonstrates how literature and art can tamper with their own past, create new bonds. As far as I know, no one has tried this witchcraft on Munch and his Puberty (she doesn’t even have a name), but now I want to paint or rewrite the girl in the painting, save her, save us. Because it’s definitely just as much about me, about saving myself from the position of a contemporary subject passively accepting the narratives offered it by past art, past stories about gender, expression, hierarchy. I want to save myself from nodding in acknowledgement to Munch, to 1890, from the outside, with insight, and accepting that Puberty is the mirror art has installed for me.”
― Jenny Hval, Girls Against God

“No one asks why I hate, no uses that word, they call me grumpy, not even angry, but grumpy, six letters, something inconsequential and self-inflicted, something powerless, insignificant, something in a small person, not something that's about society, or about them, just something that means I'm ruining things for myself, something that's in the way of my potential as an object.”
― Jenny Hval, Girls Against God

“Psychology looks like religion, and the psychologist character looks too much like God, someone you’re supposed to open up to, someone you’re supposed to approach with honesty, someone you’re supposed to use to break yourself to pieces, self-destruct in front of, so much so that the little splinters left behind can’t even be called art. This thing called opening up is really just repeating instructions. Repeating instructions is human: lonely girl kneeling before God.”
― Jenny Hval, Girls Against God

“I refuse to finish it. I tell the teacher that it’s an insult to the brain, and the teacher gives me a written warning. I wish I’d told the teacher that the Bible is an insult to the soul.”
― Jenny Hval, Girls Against God

“My hatred is radioactive, and as a child in 1990, I beam with it.”
― Jenny Hval, Girls Against God

“God’s hand rests protectively over the hand that slaps your arse at school, at the rock club, at the university and on the underground. Because God is always in the system, in the sewers, in the trash, in the garbage.”
― Jenny Hval, Girls Against God

“Why does resistance always end up just polishing the traditions? Terese asks. Or making way for them.”
― Jenny Hval, Girls Against God

“Intimacy doesn’t require hierarchies and formalities.”
― Jenny Hval, Girls Against God

“Perhaps art and magic are synonymous.”
― Jenny Hval, Girls Against God

“Metal has become legendary; it gets press time and everyone is scared, it becomes tabloid and stripped of imagination. It becomes self-expression for insecure men who want to return to a time where they could have been strong. It concerns itself with mainstream values like dominance and control, it becomes monstrous, it simplifies, it’s a tour de force and a power demonstration; it doesn’t concern itself with critique.”
― Jenny Hval, Girls Against God

“I laugh as I always do at the word hell. It’s got to be the South that returns and still exists in me, the hope in hatred.”
― Jenny Hval, Girls Against God

“A band is a desire for blasphemy against the disciplines.”
― Jenny Hval, Girls Against God

“Hatred isn’t subtle, but it’s beautiful.”
― Jenny Hval, Girls Against God

“I remember how much hope there is in hatred.”
― Jenny Hval, Girls Against God

“The internet isn’t deep enough. Sooner or later it’ll stop and something else will take over. Hatred glows in the palms of hands hovering above keyboards. That’s how writing begins, I think, not with a document or a text or a word, but with this glow, this prickling.”
― Jenny Hval, Girls Against God: A Novel

“What is it we’re lacking if we, in art and in life, just repeat and repeat and repair and repair versions of ancient hierarchies and rituals? What do we exclude? Can you hear it? What is it we’re still not saying?”
― Jenny Hval, Girls Against God

“Perhaps art and magic are synonymous. Ever since someone worked out that a sound could be a word, or that you could draw an object. When signs, or words, emerged, you could describe the surrounding world, sign less until then. And from there, figuring out that this language could also describe things that don't exist in the world was no great leap. It's possible to just make stuff up, take ourselves places we didn't know existed and that perhaps don't exist, that emerge only in the moment the voice, and later the reader or writer, is connected to language.

When this spell, language, is used to create gods and mythology, the fiction becomes so complex and self-referential that in fact it seems real, perhaps even self aware. That actually be what the singers in the old parish choir dream of; making God real through song, through their own real bodies.”
― Jenny Hval, Girls Against God

“The word band is quite similar to the word bond. Have you thought about that? A band is a bond between people. A band can emerge unexpectedly, when you talk or suddenly say the same things, or mention the same references. You harmonize in conversation, create rhythm. That's the beginning. We can dive into that beat; the beat is more alive than we are. Our hearts might stop beating in the end, but the pulse of that heartbeat will continue to symbolize time, breath, life, even after we're gone. It's that simple. All we can do to feel alive is to dive into the beat, take part in it. Some might call it dancing, but the beat doesn't necessarily build up to something regular; it's changeable, and we let go and follow it, it's there, a shadow cast both by ourselves and by eternity, continuing to spread.”
― Jenny Hval, Girls Against God

“In the end, I’ll be able to scroll myself all the way to hell.”
― Jenny Hval, Girls Against God: A Novel

“I’m given a tour of a Zen temple in the middle of town. It surprises me to see the walls, ceiling and floor looking so spotless, because the temple otherwise seems very old, and I find out I’m right, the temple is old, but the building is relatively new. It’s demolished and rebuilt every fifty years. This is done to preserve the construction technique, because the craft is more important than the object it created, the temple. Maybe it’s also to avoid cultivating attachment to a material thing. Or to avoid cultivating the self, and obliterating the illusion of value?”
― Jenny Hval, Girls Against God

“I’m at the back, alone, hating, motionless, muted, squeezed into a corner between action and meaning.”
― Jenny Hval, Girls Against God

“the Bible is an insult to the soul.”
― Jenny Hval, Girls Against God