Eat the Document Quotes

“I wondered if my life was going to be one immersion after another, a great march of shallow, unpopular popular culture infatuations that don't really last and don't really mean anything. Sometimes I even think maybe my deepest obsessions are just random manifestations of my loneliness or isolation. Maybe I infuse ordinary experience with a kind of sacred aura to mitigate the spiritual vapidity of my life....no, it is beautiful to be enraptured. To be enthralled by something, anything. And it isn't random. It speaks to you for a reason. If you wanted to, you could look at it that way, and you might find you aren't wasting your life. You are discovering things about yourself and the world, even if it is just what you find beautiful, right now, this second.”
― Dana Spiotta, Eat the Document

“Incidentally, if you have never stalked someone close to you, I highly recommend it. Check out how it tranforms them. How other they become, and how infinitely necessary and justified the stalking becomes when you realize how little you know about them, how mysterious every aspect of them seems with an at a distance but close examiniation.”
― Dana Spiotta, Eat the Document

“And disruption is liberating, especially if it is a formal, organized disruption. Mere chaos causes anxiety. Preaching didactically causes boredom. But a formal disruption -

Then it approaches beauty of a kind. Then you begin to really be dangerous.”
― Dana Spiotta, Eat the Document

“Cleanliness, particularly personal cleanliness, was an assertion against madness. It was a declaration of control.”
― Dana Spiotta, Eat the Document

“I'm turning fifty, and it is just now dawning on me that I have limited time," Nash said. "No kidding. I always felt my life was circumscribed by the finite terms, you know? There is a whole world of things I missed out on and will never experience. Whatever I have done, there is an endless amount I have not done. Do you know what that tells me?"
...
"It tells me it is not meant to be this all-encompassing journey. It is not meant to be catholic or encyclopedic. By now I have carved some grooves in this life. A few. What I need to do is hunker down and make those grooves deep and indelible.”
― Dana Spiotta, Eat the Document

“Any one of us could have bad luck. Any one of us could lose a baby. No mother could be truly secure or certain. We could all get sick and die. We could have broken, deformed babies. We couldn’t control how the child was treated by the world. Or the man. This enumeration of fears comforted her. Calmed her. She was no longer a unique being in a unique position. It wasn’t just her—to be a human is to be perpetually insecure, always edging on death, chaos, the uncontrollable. Being a mother made this apparent. And you get this small window where you can give your child a feeling of unconditional security, no matter how much fear you feel.”
― Dana Spiotta, Eat the Document

“I need these records because one day, years from now, I will listen to this music and I will remember exactly what it was like to be me now, or me a year ago, at fifteen, totally inhabited by this work, in this very specific place and time.”
― Dana Spiotta, Eat the Document

“She was not ugly, she was not pretty. But just that old-fashioned word, plain.”
― Dana Spiotta, Eat the Document