7.13.2017

Book Quotes #1

Here are some quotes I wrote in my notes. I will be posting some with photos on Instagram. I just want a place that isn't my email to have them saved on.

I played the whole set looking down, feeling like an outline of myself, trying to make my shape familiar to the audience, to the onlookers, since I had no sense of my body at all. I didn't talk, smile, look: staying put was all I had. Halfway through the set I realized that no one could tell. That the difference between half-dead and distraught and fully living could potentially go undetected. And that's when I knew I wanted to stop. I was done. I had dragged sleazier Kinney into oblivion...
  • 214 hunger makes me a modern girl

By the time we'd reached Brussels, my body felt like a bag my brain was carrying: heavy, the weight unevenly distributed, the contents smashed and scrambled. I felt raw and scraped, like a human crayon, dragging myself across surfaces, leaving a foamy smudge. 
  • hunger makes me a modern girl of 213

I didn't want to be the mr. Rogers of music, where we could open a closet and see the same ten sweaters, and everyone would know what we were going to wear since there was a predetermined set of choices. None of us were that excited about that anymore. I don't want to know what's going to happen. As frightening as that is in real life, it's a crucial aspect in creativity. Being predictable is boring, and it's also disheartening and uninspiring. We needed a sense of rediscovery, for our audience and for ourselves. 
  • hunger makes me a modern woman of 200 

There is somethings freeing in seeing yourself in a new context. People have no preconceived notion of who you are, and there is a relief in knowing that you can re-create yourself. When your entrenched in a community of people who know you, it's scary to proclaim wanting to be different and wanting to experiment....it was an extreme way to start, but I learned later on how hard it can become to unsettle yourself, to trip yourself up, and I think that's a good place to write from. It's important to undermine yourself and create a level of difficulty so the work doesn't come to easily. The more comfortable you are the more money you earn, the more successful you are, the harder it is to create situations where you have to prove yourself and make yourself not just want it, but need it. The stakes should always feel high. 
  • Ph 96 - hunger makes me a modem girl 


"My moods and my whereabouts went undetected for the most part, and I think in part that is why I didn't want to be around- I felt unseen and thus sought visibility elsewhere. " 
  •  hunger makes me a modern girl 


" there I was, holding my mug of warm tea, looking at her face, and the peaceful horizon behind her face, and I wouldn't have called it paradise exactly, but if paradise is a place where the need for protection falls away, then that's where I was. " 
  •  out of my skin 


" people who have the gift of letting go of who they are, they can afford to let go of what doesn't work. And the trick, it seemed to me, is to have something waiting, another self esteem or another way of being, something, do that in the moment of letting go, in the sensation of that sense of nothingness there's something to hold on to." 
  • out of my skin 
"And right about then I realized that I wasn't making her happy. Steve, I knew would want to make her happy too, but I also wanted to make myself happy. And being Steve wasn't doing it. This is what I call the intoxication-by-the-freedom-of not being-stage. "
  • out of my skin
"If been trying to eat tongue tacos lately, partly because of Jane, but also because tongue or lengua in Spanish, means language l, and languages are founded on words, and it was kind of invocation. Words can precipitate change, and even if cows themselves were incapable of using words, I thought in some undefined way that if I ate enough tacos de lengua the tongue might facilitate some... I didn't know. " 
  • out of my skin 
"And it's strange because if there's a mirror around, it's hard not to look. And I did look. And what I saw, literally, was the glass of the mirror itself. I knew I was there, in my peripheral vision, but I wasn't focusing on my image, I was focusing on the actual glass. Partly, it was muscle exercise, a perceptual record inaction, and partly I preferred to see only the glass. If I saw myself then I would exist, and I preferred a world without me, and without all the lumbering disappointment I seem to carry." 

"I remember thinking that if this was a movie, I would look into the mirror, and with all the significance of mirrors, I would suddenly see what I was and accept myself. With swelling music on the soundtrack, or maybe the ambient sound of traffic, I would go out into the world a new man, a changed person, full of understanding and love, and yes, I did walk out of the bathroom, into the world, but I could only wish I was in a movie. I could only wish that an actual change had taken place, that I would look up and be something different. 
  • out of my skin 

"He scooped up what soil he could salvage, and he replanted the roots in the lite that were still unbroken. This was the situation that has presented itself, and he wasn't manic and he wasn't methodical. And it wasn't a role he was playing. His utopia had been destroyed, and this was his firm if protect"
  • out of my skin

"You dont take booty to the movies " - Charo 

" the co sequences of our actions are always so complicated, so diverse, that predicting the future is very difficult business indeed...- dumbledore pg 426 
  • hp prisoner of azkavan 


"You think the dead we have loved ever truly leave us? You think we don't recall them more clearly than ever in times of great trouble? Your father is alive in you, Harry, and shows himself most plainly when you have need of him. 

"He looked like a man who did not know where he was or what to do. This helplessness was worse to watch than tears. - 
  • hp prisoner of Arkansan 


"What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude. To walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours- that is what you must be able to attain. To be solitary as you were because they looked so busy and because you didn't understand a thing about what they were doing. - 
  • party of one


"To be island like, isolated, insular, is to be at rest in the middle of the sea, content, self-sufficient, singular- you would think. You do think" - 
  • party of one 


In her apartment, Marie was not actually alone. Her stories, full of love and roads and music, were the only company she sought, more than enough. -
  •  party of one. 


It's still true that literary works by women, gays, and writers of color are often framed as specific rather than universal, small rather than big, personal or particular rather than socially significant - tiny beautiful things 

"If you can't hang, step to the side" - person on orange line 

"I never believed the boys were angry. I believed they were hurt and anger was the safest manifestation of their sorrow." Tiny beautiful things 

"We do not have the right to feel helpless. That we must help ourselves. That after destiny has delivered what it delivers, we are responsible for our lives." - tiny beautiful things 

But some were frightened. And for the frightened, coping with those changes meant hiding from them. - party of one 

It startles the young artist at first- the first few times he is told walls are not for drawing on, that mashed potatoes are not clay, that horses are not blue. In time he realizes, Oh, I'm on my own with this. My vision can't be shared or discussed in mixed company. And if I try to talk about them, someone might laugh or shake her head uncomprehendingly or try to make me stop. Someone might hurt me. - party of one 


By this time we were in our twenties, and I understood that friendship could not be manufactured. You didn't look through your address book thinking, where are the Koreans? Or I need to meet more paralyzed people. Not that it's outlandish to have such friends, but they have to be made organically - let's explore diabetes with owls David sedaris 

The people I hung out with in my early twenties were middle class and, at least to our minds, artistic. We'd all turned our backs on privilege, but comfortably, the way you can when you still have access to it. No one wanted to call home asking for money, but we all knew that in a pinch our parents would come through for us. It was this more ham race, that set me apart from delicia, for how could someone on the bottom rung of the ladder not be outraged by the unfairness of it all? 
Let's explore diabetes with owls 

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