“As a child, I used to try to love God but at the same time I was afraid He would lean down out of heaven and take a bite out of my head.” – Paulette Jiles, “Dune Trek”
Author: Tetman Callis
“This is the way it works: Only saints and bandits know how unimportant is the human body. Include soldiers. The pair is the smallest unit in which the more highly developed life forms can endure cosmic dimensions.” – Paulette Jiles, “Dune Trek”
“One thing about officers is they always get paid.” – Paulette Jiles, “Dune Trek”
“All fear the witch, and so I do. Quiet times are what we’re owed. Men alive are trouble. Makers.” – E. J. Cullen to Q, The Quarterly 1, Spring 1987
“I leave a lot out when I tell the truth.” – Amy Hempel to Q, The Quarterly 1, Spring 1987
“A good railroad man is ALWAYS ON TIME.” – George H. Baker, Standard Railroad Signals: Fireman’s and Brakeman’s Preparatory Instruction – PART ONE (emphasis in original)
“Ours is a time in which every intellectual or artistic or moral event is absorbed by a predatory embrace of consciousness: historicizing. Any statement or act can be assessed as a necessarily transient ‘development’ or, on a lower level, belittled as mere ‘fashion.’ The human mind possesses now, almost as second nature, a perspective on its own achievements that fatally undermines their value and their claim to truth. For over a century, this historicizing perspective has occupied the very heart of our ability to understand anything at all. Perhaps once a marginal tic of consciousness, it’s now a gigantic, uncontrollable gesture—the gesture whereby man indefatigably patronizes himself.” – Susan Sontag, “Thinking Against Oneself: Reflections on Cioran”
“Nobody ever says I am your prisoner without believing somehow in clemency, in mercy or in short memories, it is not something said by battered wives or people held in unnumbered rooms or children with cigarette burns.” – Paulette Jiles, “The James Poems”
“WANTED POSTER – Jesse Woodson James: five feet eleven inches tall, brown hair, regulation killer-blue eyes. In photographs appears to be considering shooting the photographer. Does not test out well. Approaches casual strangers in an intimate way and interferes massively in their private lives. Is trapped in the dead hole and neither moves nor changes. Steals horses. Inhabits a discolored landscape through which only one, treacherous path is known to pass. Has the appearance of many ballistics with a flat trajectory. This man is occupied by an army of scars, tip of middle finger left hand missing, and one large scar on chest which oft has spoken with bloody lips. Is always breaking out afresh. Cultivates a desperado aura and can most often be seen in the penny dreadfuls, spotted regularly in novels, poems, ballads, and folktales. Men claiming to be James can be differentiated from him in that they pose willingly in front of cameras, they make political speeches. These people are not the genuine article and are confused. Jess James was never confused about anything in his life, which will last exactly thirty-seven years, five months, three days, fourteen hours, and ten minutes.” – Paulette Jiles, “The James Poems”
“Wives live in a different country, a country of women without civil wars, or trains, or motivations. They arrive with bandages.” – Paulette Jiles, “The James Poems”
“Anybody who wanders around the world saying, ‘Yes, I’m from Texas,’ deserves whatever happens to him.” – Hunter S. Thompson, “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved”
“Teeth outlast everything. Death is nothing to a tooth. Hundreds of years in acidic soil just keeps a tooth clean. A fire that burns away hair and flesh and even bone leaves teeth dazzling like daisies in the ashes. Life is what destroys teeth. Undiluted apple juice in a baby bottle, sourballs, the pH balance of drinking water, tetracycline, sand in your bread if you were in the Roman army, biting seal-gut thread if you are an Eskimo woman, playing the trumpet, pulling your own teeth with a pliers.” – Jane Smiley, “The Age of Grief”
“When you get elected President I think the first thing they do is take you in a room and say you know you’re not gonna do shit. Your hands are tied and Congress have the whole thing locked down and we all get screwed.” – Willie Nelson (interviewed by Martin Chilton in Telegraph Music, 2012)
“Take the happiest man, the one most envied by the world, and in nine cases out of ten his
inmost consciousness is one of failure. Either his ideals in the line of his achievements are pitched far higher than the achievements themselves, or else he has secret ideals of which the world knows nothing, and in regard to which he inwardly knows himself to be found wanting.” – William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience
“Alcibiades. He was the Golden Boy of 4th century Athenian culture. Pericles was his guardian, Plato his teacher. A fine athlete, a brilliant general, handsome, marvelously intelligent, popular, everything. A summation of the Golden Age. And what happened? He went bad. He was vain, treacherous, selfish, sacrilegious, debauched, dishonest, and a traitor twice over. His aid to the enemy during the Syracuse campaign destroyed Athens. Just about the finest product of the most notable civilization man has accomplished, and it turned out like that. This haunts me.” – Jack Gilbert (interviewed by Gordon Lish in Genesis West, Issue #1, 1962)
“I’ll tell you, it’s much easier to say why a poorly written story is bad than why a really good story is good.” – Mikhail Iossel, Love Like Water, Love Like Fire
“When you’re young, you think there’ll be plenty of time for everything in your life: counting all the grains of sand in the Sahara Desert, seeing all the people in the world, becoming greater than Jesus and Lenin and Lomonosov and Pushkin and Einstein all rolled into one, reuniting at some point with everyone you’ve met once in your life, befriending every man, falling in love with every woman. . . . Life is a process of gradually coming to terms with the meaning and the very concept of neverness. Never—well, so be it. Quoth the raven: Oh well, them’s the breaks. Get used to it. Get over it. Life is a perishable proposition of rapidly diminishing returns. You could’ve become this or that; you could’ve been here and there and everywhere; but that didn’t happen—and well, so be it. There won’t be, in the end of your life, a joyous, transcendentally meaningful regathering of everyone you’ve ever met on your path, with stories shared and wine flowing and laughter lilting and happiness abounding and life never-ending—well, so be it.” – Mikhail Iossel, “Life: How Was It?”
“What you can laugh at, you cannot be afraid of.” – Mikhail Iossel, Notes from Cyberground
“Life passes very quickly. One day, it feels like it is still too early to tell your loved ones you love them, and then, before you know it, it is already too late.” – Mikhail Iossel, “First Death”
“Speech conquers thought, but writing commands it.” Walter Benjamin, “The Writer’s Technique in Thirteen Theses”
“You can’t wait until life doesn’t hurt anymore before you decide to be happy.” – Jane “Nightbirde” Marczewski
“You have to love dancing to stick to it. It gives you nothing back … nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive.” – Merce Cunningham (quoted in “ ‘That Single Fleeting Moment’: Merce Cunningham in Images,” by Melissa Harris)
“Neurology takes a positive view toward god and prayer. And relinquishing, which is what god and prayer is about. It is always turning your will over to a higher power and letting the will of the world and not your extraordinary manipulations lead you to your desired result. I always say that, it is my constant prayer: god, if you are out there, watch over me and your will, not mine, be done. That is what will happen anyway, but I pray for release from the dreadful fight.” – Elizabeth Wurtzel (quoted by Garance Franke-Ruta in GEN, January 8, 2020)
“I am the thing I forgot to do.” – Elizabeth Wurtzel, “I Believe in Love”
“The only antidote to panic phenomenologically, the only cure, is love — not romantic love or erotic love (though encompassing these sometimes), but selfless, unequivocal love. The sole basis of faith to live in a universe of hemorrhaging stars, predatory demons, occupying armies, and inevitable loss and grief is connection to other human beings, real connection. Otherwise, life is a march of zombies.” – Robert Grossinger, “A Phenomenology of Panic”
“You canʼt just write by spilling the words on the page. You have to arrange them. And you have to arrange them not only in terms of one another, but with the sentences that came before, and the sentences you havenʼt written yet. They have a demand.” – William H. Gass (interviewed by Greg Gerke in Tin House, Issue #54, 2012)
“Too many writers write about their lives. Itʼs easier, and itʼs seductive, and it can be catastrophic. ‘It happened to me, and therefore it must be interesting.’ You know, thatʼs sort of awful.” – William H. Gass (interviewed by Greg Gerke in Tin House, Issue #54, 2012)
“It’s a favorite myth in our culture that hardship makes you a better person, that it is merely the grindstone on which your essence is refined and polished. But the truth is that scarcity, depression, thwarted ambition, and suffering most often leaves the person a little twisted. That is the territory where mean drunks and tyrannical bastards come from.” – Jessa Crispin, “Talking to the Dead: Channeling William James in Berlin”
“Let’s say, for a moment, that the character of a city has an effect on its inhabitants, and that it sets the frequency on which it calls out to the migratory. People who are tuned a certain way will heed the call almost without knowing why. Thinking that they’ve chosen this city, they’ll never know that the city chose them. Let’s say, for a moment, that the literal situation of a city can leak out into the metaphorical realm. That the city is the vessel and we are all merely beings of differing viscosity, slowly taking on the shape of that into which we are poured.” – Jessa Crispin, “Talking to the Dead: Channeling William James in Berlin”
“I don’t see how people don’t write about sex. And also, when are you not writing about sex?” — Eileen Myles (quoted by Jen Graves in “Slog,” November 16, 2012)