“For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live.”
– Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia
[See Andrea Barrett, Mary Ruefle and Rachel Cusk.]
Category Archives: Quotes
An Essential Discomfort in the World
“We moved house often, and each time it appeared that it was the perfecting of our environment that was causing us to leave it, as though living there had been a process of construction that was now complete. (…) To continue creating, a person perhaps has to maintain an essential discomfort in the world.”
– Rachel Cusk, “Making House: Notes on Domesticity,” The New York Times Magazine 31 August 2016
[See Andrea Barrett and Mary Ruefle.]
There is an Arrival
“Taos pueblo affects me rather like one of the old monasteries. When you get there you feel something final. There is an arrival.”
– D. H. Lawrence, ‘Taos,’ Phoenix (1978)
Minus the Time-Consuming Mechanics of Plot and Story
“There’s a lot of stuff like this in Minima Moralia, the kind of observations you might get in fiction, minus the time-consuming mechanics of plot and story.”
– Geoff Dyer, White Sands: Experiences from the Outside World (2016)
Somewhere Else
“We are here to go somewhere else.”
– Geoff Dyer, White Sands: Experiences from the Outside World, 2016
Is it Easier?
“Is it easier to surrender to death than life?”
– Deborah Levy, Hot Milk, 2016
The Not-Being I Have Already Been
“The not-being that I have already been. I whisper it to myself, like a mantra, or a lullaby.”
– Jenny Diski, In Gratitude, 2016
Speaking on the Threshold of Being
One must be receptive, receptive to the image at the moment it appears: if there be a philosophy of poetry, it must appear and re-appear through a significant verse, in total adherence to an isolated image; to be exact, in the very ecstasy of the newness of the image (Penguin, p. 1).
The poet speaks on the threshold of being (p. 2).
But these acts of emergence are repeated; poetry puts language in a state of emergence, in which life becomes manifest through its vivacity. These linguistic impulses, which stand out from the ordinary rank of pragmatic language, are miniatures of the vital impulse. A micro-Bergsonism that abandoned the thesis of language-as-instrument in favor of the thesis of language-as-reality would find in poetry numerous documents on the intense life of language (p. 11).
– Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 1958
Trying to Make a Foreign Language
“I was trying,” Mina Loy observed in 1927, with reference to her polyglot, punning, scholastic, asyntactic, unpunctuated free-verse poems, “to make a foreign language, because English had already been used.”
– Marjorie Perloff, “The Mina Loy Mysteries: Legend and Language,” American Book Review October-November 1996
Not Feeling At Home At Home
“I’m going to talk about the making of home,” she says. “Women put so much of their energy into creating a home: it’s something I respect deeply; I’ve made a few myself. But there comes a stage, it seems to me, where women don’t feel at home in their home; the very place they’ve created is the place they want to leave. That interests me.”
– Deborah Levy, “A Life In…: Deborah Levy” by Sarah Crown, The Guardian 19 March 2016
ANDREW GALLIX 