Down Below Quotes

“I think she was mistaken when she said I was torturing myself. I think that she interpreted me fragmentarily, which is worse than not to interpret at all.”
― Leonora Carrington, Down Below

“I am afraid I am going to drift into fiction, truthful but incomplete, for lack of some details which I cannot conjure up today and which might have enlightened us. This morning, the idea of the egg came again to my mind and I thought that I could use it as a crystal to look at Madrid in those days of July and August 1940—for why should it not enclose my own experiences as well as the past and future history of the Universe? The egg is the macrocosm and the microcosm, the dividing line between the Big and the Small which makes it impossible to see the whole. To possess a telescope without its other essential half—the microscope—seems to me a symbol of the darkest incomprehension. The task of the right eye is to peer into the telescope, while the left eye peers into the microscope.”
― Leonora Carrington, Down Below

“How could I write this when I don't even dare think about it? I am terribly anguished, yet I cannot continue living alone with such a memory...I know that once this has been written down, I shall be delivered. You must know, otherwise I shall be persecuted to the end of my living days. But shall I be able to express with mere words the horror of that day?”
― Leonora Carrington, Down Below

“Before taking up the actual facts of my experience, I want to say that the sentence passed on me by society at that particular time was probably, surely even, a god-send, for I was not aware of the importance of health, I mean of the absolute necessity of having a healthy body to avoid disaster in the liberation of the mind. More important yet, the necessity that others be with me that we may feed each other with our knowledge and thus constitute the Whole.”
― Leonora Carrington, Down Below

“I heard Catherine say: "The brakes have jammed." "Jammed!" I, too, was jammed within, by forces foreign to my conscious will, which were also paralyzing the car.”
― Leonora Carrington, Down Below

“The time had not come for me to understand. What I am going to endeavor to express here with the utmost fidelity was but an embryo of knowledge.”
― Leonora Carrington, Down Below

“What I am going to endeavor to express here with the utmost fidelity was but an embryo of knowledge.”
― Leonora Carrington, Down Below