Vladimir Quotes

“I didn’t want to be in the world, around all those people who didn’t read books, who didn’t think they were important.”
― Julia May Jonas, Vladimir

“Should we only portray the world we wanted to see? Should we consider certain stories “damaging,” and restrict them from a general audience, not trusting them to take in the story without internalizing the messaging? Hadn’t we all agreed that morality in art was bad? But art did cause damage, and I was affected by films I had seen when I was young, and I was ashamed when I watched an old film and saw racist depictions I hadn’t seen before, and I was glad to be ashamed. But did we all have to see ourselves in the presentations of types? Did I have to feel like every wife and mother was presenting an overarching narrative of Wife and Mother that reinforced or rejected my own experience?”
― Julia May Jonas, Vladimir

“I loved that the complexities of my emotions were understood by authors writing hundreds of years ago, I loved looking at their texts and trying to understand what they were aiming to do, to pull my own meaning from them, to point out what others didn’t see or notice—the repetition of blue imagery, the recapitulation of motifs of separation. I was good at that.”
― Julia May Jonas, Vladimir

“Compliments made you supplicant, equal, and master all at once. Supplicant because you are below, admiring; equal because you have the same taste; and master because you are bestowing your approval.”
― Julia May Jonas, Vladimir

“Electra spends the entirety of Sophocles's play in a doorway, I say to my students, when we read his Theban trilogy in my Adaptations course. She is unable to return home and unable to venture into the world. Pay attention to doorways, to paths, to in-between spaces, I tell them, these are the places of transformation.”
― Julia May Jonas, Vladimir

“What a relief, I thought, to free oneself from the heterosexual prison. Straightness : the predictable container in which all possible outcomes seemed already etched into stone—happiness, unhappiness, complacency, strife—a life in which we were all operating inside of a story already told, even as we sought to live an authentic existence.”
― Julia May Jonas, Vladimir

“People said this crop of youth was weak, but we knew differently. We knew they were so strong -- so much stronger than us, and equipped with better weapons, more effective tactics. They brought us to our knees with their softness, their consistent demand for the consideration of their feelings -- the way they could change all we thought would stay the same for the rest of our lives, be it stripping naked for male directors in undergraduate productions of The Bacchae, ignoring racist statements in supposedly great works of literature, or working for less when others were paid more. They had changed all that we hadn't been able to, and our defense was to call them soft.”
― Julia May Jonas, Vladimir

“When I was in college, the lust I felt for my professors was overwhelming. It did not matter if they were men or women, attractive or unattractive, brilliant or average, I desired them deeply. I desired them because I thought they had the power to tell me about myself.”
― Julia May Jonas, Vladimir

“Oh, they drove me crazy, being so completely obsessed with whether or not people were represented well, wanting every piece of literature to be some utopian screed of fairness.”
― Julia May Jonas, Vladimir

“And what was I to say? Most days, these days, I didn’t feel as though I loved him. Most days I thought of him as a problem I would have to solve eventually, when I felt like making the effort.”
― Julia May Jonas, Vladimir

“He was happy, I could tell. Happy to be free, happy to be a genius, happy to be a beautiful man with his elbow out the open window, squinting at the sun in the October afternoon.”
― Julia May Jonas, Vladimir

“For our lives were, as writers, essentially little by nature. Writers have to lead little lives, otherwise you can't find time for writing.”
― Julia May Jonas, Vladimir

“It’s why you should never admire people. They’ll only disappoint you.”
― Julia May Jonas, Vladimir

“I ask this one thing: let me go mad in my own way.”
― Julia May Jonas, Vladimir

“Nothing is more alluring than a mother-before-she-was-a-mother, an unknowable and irresistible figure.”
― Julia May Jonas, Vladimir

“At one point we would have called these affairs consensual, for they were, and were conducted with my vague understanding that they were happening. Now, however, young women have apparently lost all agency in romantic entanglements. Now my husband was abusing his power, never mind that power is the reason they desired him in the first place. Whatever the current state of my marriage may be, I still can't think about it all without my blood boiling. My anger is not so much directed toward the accusations as it is toward the lack of self-regard these women have - the lack of their own confidence. I wish they could see themselves not as little leaves swirled around by the wind of a world that does not belong to them, but as powerful, sexual women interested in engaging in a little bit of danger, a little bit of taboo, a little bit of fun. With the highly objectionable move toward a populist insistence of morality in art, I find this post hoc prudery offensive, as a fellow female.”
― Julia May Jonas, Vladimir

“I want to throw them all a Slut Walk and let them know that when they’re sad, it’s probably not because of the sex they had, and more because they spend too much time on the internet, wondering what people think of them.”
― Julia May Jonas, Vladimir

“She loved the way phrases could become solid, and then could have their solidity stripped from them, all by interpretation, all by language, language, and more language.”
― Julia May Jonas, Vladimir

“This year I skipped my whole introductory lecture—usually a litany of references and quotations that I prepped and practiced for well in advance—designed to cow and delight my students. This year, instead, I asked them to speak about themselves and their experiences. While I wish I could say that this decision came from a desire to get to know them, it did not. On my notes for the class I wrote: “Have them talk! (They’re only interested in what they think, anyway.)”
― Julia May Jonas, Vladimir

“People want books to absorb them, but one could force attention upon a book. It would be back and forth for the first half hour, but if you meant it, you could rope your mind into sublime and single-pointed concentration.”
― Julia May Jonas, Vladimir

“And perhaps there was: when I look at my female students now, even the messiest, the sloppiest, the ones who drink Pepsi Max at 9 a.m., I see in them the beauty of youth—the beauty of their plumpness, their half-formed-ness, that skin that’s lit from underneath.”
― Julia May Jonas, Vladimir

“we talked about how different the college used to be—rigorous but freewheeling (drugs, drinking, sex)—and how neutered the kids were now, calling their moms every day, prizing friendship over romance.”
― Julia May Jonas, Vladimir

“There’s something exhausting about being constantly bombarded by everyone’s best efforts,” I said.”
― Julia May Jonas, Vladimir

“Should we consider certain stories "damaging" and restrict them from a general audience, not trusting them to take in the story without internalizing the messaging? Hadn't we all agreed that morality in art was bad?”
― Julia May Jonas, Vladimir

“There’s something exhausting about being constantly bombarded by everyone’s best efforts,”
― Julia May Jonas, Vladimir

“Perhaps it was this idea of self-expression and this thought that if we were fully to release this sadness, or if we were to alter it too much--if we were to give up all the obsessions and anxieties that caused us pain-then we would become a kind of person we disdained, someone content with an abstract idea of the littleness of their lives. For our lives were, as writers, essentially little by nature. Writers have to lead lite lives, otherwise you can't find time for writing. Was depression simply a hanging on to grandeur?”
― Julia May Jonas, Vladimir

“I was too happy that we were speaking again to let her annoyance feel like anything other than the feeble blows that daughters lob against their mothers to make sure they'll still be loved, even at their most peevish.”
― Julia May Jonas, Vladimir

“Onları konuştur! (Kendi düşündüklerinden başka bir şeyle ilgilenmiyorlar zaten.)”
― Julia May Jonas, Vladimir

“Ama bu yaz gözlerim kelimelere odaklanamıyordu adeta. İcat edilmiş dünyalar, kurmacanın bütün uydurmalığı ve çalıntılığı, tüm karakterler... Sundukları her şey nihayetinde çok kıt ve acınası geliyordu. Tarihlere, gerçeklere, sayılara, istatistiklere ihtiyacım vardı. Silahlara yani. İşte burası yaşadığımız dünya ve bu dünyada bunlar oldu.”
― Julia May Jonas, Vladimir

“Bazen iyi yaşanmış bir hayat gibi geliyor gözüme. Bazen de her şeyi yakıp kül etmek, minimalist olmak geliyor içimden.”
― Julia May Jonas, Vladimir