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Inferno (A Poet's Novel) QUOTES

Inferno (A Poet's Novel) QUOTES

1 " Sometimes in utter hopelessness I put my cheek on the table like it was someone. I wanted to wake my brain up and be loved. "

― Eileen Myles , Inferno (A Poet's Novel)

2 " If passion was a substance I would say it is dark brown, and then blood red. It's like wet grass, tons of it soaked in mud. It's warm and it stinks like shit and it's unaccountably and endlessly good. It's thick and it goes on for miles and it isn't so much deep as bottomless and it holds you in its grip, you never drown. And then it goes. That's all you know. "

― Eileen Myles , Inferno (A Poet's Novel)

3 " What happened was private. I was in it with Rose. She had hurt me grievously and now I was forever attached. I was in it now with all the women in the world. I walked home glad. I will die, I thought with a bounce in my step. I'm whole. Not whole like anyone else, but whole like me. Painful, but simple. It was very simple now. "

― Eileen Myles , Inferno (A Poet's Novel)

4 " All the details of my life were in exact order and yet I was tumbling in them-out of order like a tremendous wave had hit me and I was thrown off the ship and I awoke or dreaming, or dead I knew not-no I couldn't speak. "

― Eileen Myles , Inferno (A Poet's Novel)

5 " But if I paid attention, really paid attention maybe I could ignore the mountain of sadness and she might entertain and distract me and I would think this is life. The romance and the sadness. I am in it now. I did do that which is what happened. "

― Eileen Myles , Inferno (A Poet's Novel)

6 " The poet’s life is just so much crenellated waste, nights and days whipping swiftly or laboriously past the cinematic window. We’re hunched and weaving over the keys of our green our grey or pink blue manual typewriter maybe a darker stone cold thoritative selectric with its orgasmic expectant hum and us popping pills and laughing over what you or I just wrote, wondering if that line means insult or sex. Or both. Usually both. "

― Eileen Myles , Inferno (A Poet's Novel)

7 " Because rich people need poor friends (but not too poor!) to maintain their connection to the struggle that spawned them even if they never struggled. Poor people tend to know what's going on plus they are often good-looking, at least when they are young and even later they are the cool interesting people the rich person once slept with, so the poor person always feathers the nests of the rich. "

― Eileen Myles , Inferno (A Poet's Novel)

8 " The room was the poem, the day I was in. Oh Christ. What writes my poem is the second ring, inner or outer. Poetry is just the performance of it. These little things, whether I write them or not. That's the score. The thing of great value is you. Where you are, glowing and fading, while you live. "

― Eileen Myles , Inferno (A Poet's Novel)

9 " Nope, I am destroyed. A shattered boat of a person. A broken window here, a lousy bell there. An old crappy dyke with half a brain leaking into a book. A drippy excrescence. A schmear. "

― Eileen Myles , Inferno (A Poet's Novel)

10 " 1990 was a totally political time. George Bush was president, people were dying of AIDS, a lot of our friends, and there was no money being spent by the government either on AIDS or art. So a lot of extreme sexual and political work was made at that time. It was in response to the situation. But that kind of "edgy" political work wasn't exactly what I was doing. I felt a little like my mother. I just wasn't surprised that the government wouldn't support this work. What would you expect. I had personally grown up in a world of total censorship so I wasn't surprised to see politicians wanting to take money away from the art that was explicitly talking about this entire reality of ours. It seemed like the real desire from them (the politicians) was to have no description. That's what they would have paid for. ...Doing their business, wars or whatever, behind the scenes and meanwhile propagating a giant nothing which has become a something the government and the media have only perfected since. To a very large extent people don't even know. I mean it's kind of the great product of this country. The American Way. A big nothing. A cataclysmic unawareness in the face of evil. "

― Eileen Myles , Inferno (A Poet's Novel)

11 " It seemed like people then had a lot of feelings and you could get all bundled up like Eli had and brood with them for a while, or you could recoil entirely like I was doing (for professional reasons) and consider your behavior just art, grist for the mill. "

― Eileen Myles , Inferno (A Poet's Novel)

12 " Who doesn’t envy a child’s endless sense of things. Not that they have it but it’s what they feel. It’s what we’re born to know. A sensation of being unhampered by anything except adults. "

― Eileen Myles , Inferno (A Poet's Novel)

13 " The secret of the world, the inside of it – I had evidence now – was undeniably lesbian. And every woman I knew wanted to be one. And I wanted Rose. Day in and day out. My wanting her was my wanting to be alive. "

― Eileen Myles , Inferno (A Poet's Novel)

14 " Finally I sent her a postcard with a dolphin leaping through a flaming hoop on its front. When you wiggled the postcard the dolphin leapt through. I felt that said it all and I had just quit jumping for her. "

― Eileen Myles , Inferno (A Poet's Novel)

15 " Watching the fragments float by for years. "

― Eileen Myles , Inferno (A Poet's Novel)

16 " I-I can’t find that track. Would you send it to me. Oh I do? I have it? You’re right. It is there. But now I can’t open it. I’m trying. "

― Eileen Myles , Inferno (A Poet's Novel)

17 " Or the angry ones. Holding their heads oh no like a virus is taking over. My mind! Like it’s such a big deal. Minds are always being taken over. Succumb, don’t resist. Because we do get to choose what we are succumbing to. We create worlds out of what we put into our heads. I don’t know about you. It’s why I read. "

― Eileen Myles , Inferno (A Poet's Novel)

18 " Later on I published these poems as Sappho’s Boat to make damn sure everyone knew what I meant. "

― Eileen Myles , Inferno (A Poet's Novel)

19 " Gömleğimi çıkardım ve hiç kimseye dönüştüm, isimsiz, cinsiyetsiz, yalnızca bir arazide bir köpekle etrafta gezinen bir canlı. Bana bunu sanat getirdi. "

― Eileen Myles , Inferno (A Poet's Novel)

20 " Her face was kind of Chinese. Like Mongolian. She kind of looked like a dog. One of those little dogs. The way all her hair framed her face and her big glasses and that small face reading and then her voice was deep. Like she was used to using it. Not for talking, not for teaching. She intoned. It was like she was a little ugly church. I thought she was ugly. A woman could be such a mess, so dark. But it was great. This is a poet. Her poem was about New York and buildings and just how unhappy she had been there. "Between the lower east side tenements the sky is a snotty handkerchief." The clouds were full of snot. What an idea. A woman who was kind of ugly said that. "

― Eileen Myles , Inferno (A Poet's Novel)