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Mauve Desert QUOTES

Mauve Desert QUOTES

1 " I cannot get close to any you. "

― Nicole Brossard , Mauve Desert

2 " I was fifteen and with every ounce of my strength I was leaning into my thoughts to make them slant reality toward the light. "

― Nicole Brossard , Mauve Desert

3 " Then I stop existing. She is talking, talking, takes off who knows where, she says it all starts over, speech, paths, butterflies and that she just loves words' inevitable slowness, she says that when in distress everything is overcome by the sound of words and that everything then becomes impossible to understand, she says things are exploding in her head and that everything must be attempted again like a backhand, a lob in mindspace, she repeats the mind is fragile but the eyes, but the eyes Melanie, she says one must not give up, that nothing is impossible if in the realm of the improbable memory realises the certitude which in us keeps an eye out for beauty on the horizon, she talks about our attachment to certain words, that they are like small slow deaths in concise reality. "

― Nicole Brossard , Mauve Desert

4 " But as a translator you have none. You’ve chosen the difficult task of reading backwards in your language what in mine flows from source. – But when I read you, I read you in your language. – How can you understand me if you read me in one language and simultaneously transpose into another what cannot adequately find its place in it? How am I to believe for a single moment that the landscapes in you won’t erase those in me? – Because true landscapes loosen the tongue in us, flow over the edge of our thought-frame. They settle into us. "

― Nicole Brossard , Mauve Desert

5 " Kathy Kerouac knew the power of her voice. It was, she said, her 'golden thing,' an amulet protecting her against all disorders of the spirit. Her voice was a charm that could stop violence and transform crudeness into curtesy, foolishness into finesse. So Kathy Kerouac was under the impression that nothing was ever altogether dangerous, the feeling that no word spoken could soil her world. "

― Nicole Brossard , Mauve Desert

6 " Yet the voice could take fright. This Kathy Kerouac foresaw only too well when syllables suddenly started coming out of her mouth like little fragments of oblivion giving her the impression she was contradicting herself. It was in these moments, when words were both true and false, solemn and light, on the tip of her tongue and deep in the throat, that space shrank in her mouth like a hard-felt blow. "

― Nicole Brossard , Mauve Desert

7 " When two words are identical, you must not take undue offence or think you have been wronged in terms of choice. Simplicity is a fine patience of meaning. "

― Nicole Brossard , Mauve Desert

8 " Keep to Beauty. Have no fear. Learn to bear the unbearable. The raw of all things. "

― Nicole Brossard , Mauve Desert

9 " Since I’ve been rereading this book I’m anchored at point zero, considering a thousand strategies and points of view which soon dissolve, abstraction, abstraction, the gaze melts. "

― Nicole Brossard , Mauve Desert

10 " Here I am, motionless in the room, watching what is going on in the street. Nothing. Only reality. "

― Nicole Brossard , Mauve Desert