s.penkevich > Books: favorites‎ (62)

‘In the course of this life I have had a great many encounters with a great many people who have been concerned with matters of consequence. I have lived a great deal among grown-ups. I have seen them intimately, close at hand. And that hasn't much improved my opinion of them.’

‘It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.’

‘But you mustn’t forget it. You become responsible forever for what you’ve tamed. You’re responsible for your rose.’

‘A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.’

‘It’s not a transferable part of who I am. Nor is it alterable. So much of a poet’s formation has to do with rootedness, not just in a place but in a past. For good and ill, I’m constructed by that past, from the journey of those events and the struggle of that history. There’s no way of unwriting that and none of unliving it.’

‘Can a single writer challenge a collective past? My answer is simple. Not only can, but should. Poetry should be scrubbed, abraded, cleared, and restated with the old wash stones of argument and resistance. It should happen every generation.’

‘First, with Irsh men, by numerous foreign invasions, and, second, exclusively as women, by nationalism, a male preserve. As an icon of the long-suffering nation, the Irish woman becomes “Mother Ireland,” a static and silent object distanced from her actual, decidedly unromantic self.’

‘ I always thought ordinary life was worth writing about, and that included my own…the subjects of the Irish poem back then were often landscapes or historical events or political memory. I was a woman in a house in the suburbs, married with two small children. It was a life lived by many women around me, but it was still not named in Irish poetry.’

‘Language. At first this was what I lacked. Not just the historic speech of the country. I lacked that too, but so did others. This was a deeper loss; I returned to find that my vocabulary of belonging was missing. The street names, the meeting places – it was not just that I did not know them. It was something more. I had never known them. I had lost not only a place but the past that goes with it and, with it, the clues from which to construct my present self.’

‘Making a poem is making an object. I always thought of them more as drawings than as texts, but drawings that are also physically enterable through the fact of language. It was another way to think of a book, an object that is as visually real as it is textually real.’

‘Putting a door on the female mouth has been an important project of patriarchal culture from antiquity to the present day. Its chief tactic is an ideological association of female sound with monstrosity, disorder and death.’

‘The soldier is a sacred figure, an image in their ideology as olive trees are in ours. When they look at their soldiers, they see sons and daughters. When we look at their soldiers, our hearts also beat harder, although it is for different reasons.’

‘This hostility to theater perhaps had to do with its transitory nature: as a live, essentially unrepeatable art form, theater can be unpredictable and even volatile. It can incite action—the double meaning in the English word “act” is brought to life in the Palestinian context. It’s also an art form comprised of bodies occupying space. The backbone of the Israeli occupation is a military regime whose principal mechanism of power is the control of bodies in space.’

‘[W]hen you read a novel about the occupation and feel understood, or watch a film and feel seen, your anger, which is like a wound, is dressed for a brief time and you can go on enduring…feel connected to the other people in the room…a kind of flowering in the chest at this sight of your community’s resistance embalemd in art.’

‘The poetics of Aristotle is the poetics of oppression: the world is known, perfect or about to be perfected, and all its values are imposed on the spectators, who passively delegate power to the characters to act and think in their place. In so doing the spectators purge themselves of their tragic flaw—that is, of something capable of changing society.’

‘I was not under the illusion that going to Sarajevo to direct a play would make me useful in the way I could be if I were a doctor or a water systems engineer…But it was the only one of the three things I do—write, make films, and direct in the theater—which yields something that would exist only in Sarajevo, that would be made and consumed there.’

‘I don’t agree with Mariam there. But I think it’s misguided to believe a single work of art can, by itself, act quickly and significantly on the world; this seems like a category error.’

‘It’s a totally lopsided ideological element of American culture, that the highest good is free speech, rather than that free speech is a side product of a just political system... Obviously, it’s also completely hypocritical because it’s always free speech except for when it comes to Palestine.’

Since it is a city by nature of astonishing beauty, the ugly — criminality, violence, corruption, connivance, the aggressive fear in which we live defenseless, the deterioration of democracy — stands out more clearly.’
-Ferrante, in conversation with

‘I would have liked the nice manners that the teacher and the priest preached, but I felt that those ways were not suited to our neighborhood, even if you were a girl.’

‘At that moment I knew what the plebs were, much more clearly than when, years earlier, she had asked me. The plebs were us. The plebs were that fight for food and wine, that quarrel over who should be served first and better, that dirty floor on which the waiters clattered back and forth, those increasingly vulgar toasts. The plebs were my mother, who had drunk wine and now was leaning against my father’s shoulder, while he, serious, laughed, his mouth gaping, at the sexual allusions of the metal dealer. They were all laughing, even Lila, with the expression of one who has a role and will play it to the utmost.’

‘Then let me advise you to take up your little burdens again; for though they seem heavy sometimes, they are good for us, and lighten as we learn to carry them. Work is wholesome, and there is plenty for every one; it keeps us from ennui and mischief; is good for health and spirits, and gives us a sense of power and independence better than money or fashion.’

‘that season of peculiar and inexhaustible influence on the mind of taste and tenderness — that season which has drawn from every poet worthy of being read some attempt at description, or some lines of feeling.’

‘All across the country, people felt bereaved and shocked. All across the country, people felt righteous. All across the country, people felt sick. All across the country, people felt history at their shoulder. All across the country, people felt history meant nothing. All across the country, people felt like they counted for nothing. All across the country, people had pinned their hopes on it. All across the country, people waved flags in the rain. All across the country, people drew swastika graffiti. All across the country, people threatened other people. All across the country, people told people to leave. All across the country, the media was insane. All across the country, politicians lied. All across the country, politicians fell apart…’

‘Language is like poppies. It just takes something to churn the earth round them up, and when it does up come the sleeping words, bright red, fresh, blowing about.’

‘Hope is exactly that, that’s all it is, a matter of how we deal with the negative acts towards human beings by other human beings in the world, remembering that they and we are all human, that nothing human is alien to us, the foul and the fair, and that most important of all we’re here for a mere blink of the eyes, that’s all.’

‘Poetry is the attempt to understand fully what is real, what is present, what is it imaginable, what is feelable, and how can I loosen the grip of what I already know to find some new, changed relationship, to find something I didn’t know until the poem was written and finished? And then I know something new, and I have been changed.…poems are vessels of transformation. They are the glass crucible that a chemical reaction takes place in. And what comes out at the end is a different thing than what went in at the beginning.’

‘Another girl like me exists, and she is the most perfect girl in the world. The awful deed is done, our perfect love comes to life. I am hers, and she is mine.’

‘Tonight I find myself looking for her scent in the air, her touch in the pillowcase. It’s a strain to find meaning where there is none. It’s such a teenaged thing to do, why can I not stop doing it? Not everything is a symbol. Sometimes the world is plain and obvious. Sometimes the things I feel and the things I want don’t matter.’

‘The Summer has been just a little bit too warm, the sun has been a little too bright. My thoughts have been a little bit too uncontrollable. And my emotions a little too humid. They only grow more humid. It all just gets stickier. Soon I think I will be unable to go even one day without lying on the grass with her.’

‘Nasty rumours, which are scarcely confirmed and forever remembered…This is not a forgiving place. The fear of it takes me over. It takes us all over. We all have secrets, everybody is hiding something.’

‘At last, I am defined. All my lonely days were not wasted, they led me to this most perfect union, this weaving of our two souls. The parts of me that were once afraid can no longer be found.Perhaps they will come back to terrify me again, but for now, I can’t feel them. For now, I allow myself to be wanted by her.’

‘ I live in a body that has loved her and I see with eyes that have witnessed her. She is part of my muscles, my tissue, she is unforgettable.’

‘I always thought a place like Crossmore would kill a person like me, but I realise now that places like Crossmore are made for people like me. There is space for me, for us, out on the edges, among the ruins and the hedges and the stone walls. These things are immovable. They belong to the world and cannot be altered. I hope that Susannah and I are like these things.I carve our initials into trees and scratch them onto rocks, hoping that a piece of us will remain in the landscape.’

‘Never in all my years of Christianity has there been talk of an angel like this.’

‘‘My love now seems to be an aggressive, political thing. It is the ceaseless search for an identity and then committing to that identity. It is a fight to exist in my own home. Is that not exhausting? Is it worth it? It feels like the good parts of loving have been thrown on the backseat and forgotten about.’

‘If everybody loved me as much as they claim to, I don’t think I would be in this position, back and forth between them like a pendulum, always stuck between her and everything else in the world. I am so sick I could scream.’

‘Being in his company has become so loaded. Now that he thinks I am almost his girlfriend, it’s like I am no longer his friend…Our boundaries, our language, our movements, they must all be monitored, I must bend over backwards to stop from hurting or arousing his feelings.’

‘These days all anyone wants to talk about is what is going to happen next, so much so that nobody cares about what’s happening now. All Susannah wants to do is run away, and all Martin wants to do is settle down, and I realise that I’ve only ever thought of ways to keep everyone happy, so I have no idea what I want’

‘And that’s why, when you write a poem, you write it for anybody and everybody. And you have to be ready to do that out of your single self. It’s a giving. It’s always — it’s a gift. It’s a gift to yourself, but it’s a gift to anybody who has a hunger for it.’

‘You are capable of anything. Good or bad. You always have been, and you always will be. Given the right push, you, too, could do horrible things. That darkness exists within all of us.’

‘Someone, somewhere, right now is being impacted by your existence—whether good or bad. That’s what I choose to believe this is all about. Not connection—but how we affect each other. Even at a distance.’

’Stories are compensatory. The world is unfair, unjust, unknowable, out of control. When we tell a story we exercise control, but in such a way as to leave a gap, an opening. It is a version, but never the final one. And perhaps we hope that the silences will be heard by someone else, and the story can continue, can be retold.’

’Why would God make a world so imperfect that it must be continually righting itself? …now he was faced with a maverick God who had made a world for the fun of seeing how it might develop ...Perhaps there was no God at all.’

‘I would let death enter me as you had entered me. You had crept along my blood vessels through the wound, and the blood that circulates returns to the heart. You circulated me, you made me blush like a girl in the hoop of your hands. You were in my arteries and my lymph, you were the colour just under my skin, and if I cut myself, it was you I bled. Red Isolde, alive on my fingers, and always the force of blood pushing you back to my heart.’

‘Who taught you to write in blood on my back? Who taught you to use your hands as branding irons? You have scored your name into my shoulders, referenced me with your mark. The pads of your fingers have become printing blocks, you tap a message on to my skin, meaning into my body.’

‘Louise, in this single bed, between these garish sheets, I will find a map as likely as any treasure hunt. I will explore you and mine you and you will redraw me according to your will. We shall cross one another's boundaries and make ourselves one nation.’

‘The body that has lain beside you in sickness and in health. The body your arms still long for dead or not. You were intimate with every muscle, privy to the eyelids moving in sleep. This is the body where your name is written, passing into the hands of strangers.’

’I believe in fiction and the power of stories because that way we speak in tongues. We are not silenced. All of us, when in deep trauma, find we hesitate, we stammer; there are long pauses in our speech. The thing is stuck. We get our language back through the language of others. We can turn to the poem. We can open the book. Somebody has been there for us and deep-dived the words.’

’Later, when I was successful, but accused of arrogance, I wanted to drag every journalist who misunderstood to this place, and make them see that for a woman, a working-class woman, to want to be a writer, to want to be a good writer, and to believe that you are good enough, that was not arrogance; that was politics.’

'Creative work bridges time because the energy of art is not time-bound. If it were we should have no interest in the art of the past, except as history or documentary. But our interest in art is our interest in ourselves both now and always. Here and forever. There is a sense of the human spirit always existing. This makes our own death bearable. Life + art is a boisterous communion/communication with the dead. It is a boxing match with time.’

’When Takeo said the word ‘scare’ the fear that I had been feeling this whole week blew up inside of me all at once. That’s because it is scary. I’m scary. Takeo is scary. Waiting is scary. Tadokoro, Mr. Nakano, Sakiko, Masayo, and even Mr. Crane — they were all scary. Even more frightening was my own self.’

‘I hate cellphones...there has been no greater evil for love affairs—those that are going well as much as those that are going badly—due to the greatly increased ability to receive phone calls no matter where you are, no matter what the situation.’

‘There is nothing you can do that profit does not enter into, and fear of loss, and wish for power. You cannot say good morning without knowing which of you is 'superior' to the other, or trying to prove it. You cannot act like a brother to other people, you must manipulate them, or command them, or obey them, or trick them. You cannot touch another person, yet they will not leave you alone. There is no freedom.’

’You the possessors are the possessed. You are all in jail. Each alone, solitary, with a heap of what he owns. You live in prison, die in prison. It is all I can see in your eyes—the wall, the wall!’