Category: Quotes

But knowing everything is too much like knowing nothing; without a story, it’s all just information.

~The Candy House, Jennifer Egan

“To be alive means full body contact with the absurd.”

~Fight Night, Miriam Toews

Anyone who puts on a crown, even if only as an experiment, will end up looking for a kingdom.

~Frankenstein in Baghdad, Ahmed Saadawi

i want you
to succumb to
human circumstance
for me

~Modern Locket, Shy Watson (2021)

Grief is a house with no windows or doors and no way of telling the time.

~Sisters, Daisy Johnson

The illusion of safety was an invention of the West.

~Build Your House Around My Body, Violet Kupersmith

I saw you, as if in the middle of a sentence…

From Out of Some Other Paradise by Alex Dimitrov (2017)

“before the invention of boundaries (which was the invention of fences, and also the invention of countries – countries being the invention of men wearing clothes the colour of trees, patrolling the arbitrary lines, the dark promise of their rifles);

before the invention of stamps (which was the invention of bureaucracy, which was the invention of embassies, which was the invention of old women gathered hopelessly on Hope Road, the quartz of their sweat glistening on their foreheads)”

~from “Here That Was Here Before” by Kei Miller

“creative output of any kind depends upon a steady stream of tiny self-delusions — guardrails to keep yourself from veering into a pit of self-doubt and despair…”

R.E. Hawley