Wesley Stace > Quotes

“You are undoubtedly of the opinion that men are superior to women. Esmond?”
“Well, I…”
“You are wrong. Eve is superior because she was created after Adam. God didn’t take backward steps, so Eve must be an improvement.”
― Wesley Stace, Misfortune

“They're not doing much for themselves. I'm sure they'd rather slip away, relax their fingers and float, but they can't. They're not allowed. Effort is so painful; our knuckles are white, yet we keep clinging. The alternative is suicide- and we are too fearful for that.”
― Wesley Stace, By George

“Even at such a tender age, I knew that life is lived in leftovers, account ledgers, and timetables rather than in the Platonic sphere of perfect theory. I couldn't float sylphlike around Love Hall in the flowing robes of indeterminacy for the rest of my life, however much I wished there to be no change. I had to accept my responsibilities and, at least in the eyes of the world and at least for the time being, nail my colors to a mast. Unless I wished to appear a strange wonder for the rest of time, caked in circus makeup covering the truth inches beneath, the mast would be male.”
― Wesley Stace, Misfortune

“When the two become the one
And the inside outside, the outside in
So that the male be not male nor the female female
Then will you see me.”
― Wesley Stace

“I had tried, as best I could, to forget the people who had said they loved me, and I had been able to do so only by replacing their memory with hatred for them and their crimes. Time is no healer. It scabs the wound until the injury is forgotten, but the infection festers, eating away, spreading.”
― Wesley Stace, Misfortune

“Within the walls of Love Hall, Lord Loveall could command this kind of respect.”
― Wesley Stace, Misfortune

“Everything would turn out exactly the same, and I would return here for a second time, and then, if I was fool enough, a third time, waiting, as now, for my other to touch the canvas. And it would be progressively worse, because though I would know slightly more each time, I would still be powerless to change my fate. Perhaps I would be unaware of the previous decision, yet choose again to come back. Or worse, I would become aware that I was inadvertently repeating the same mistake for a horrific split second just after I made the decision. Infinity was terrifying. Its abyss makes my skin crawl.”
― Wesley Stace, Misfortune

“They change what they do not like,’ said Jessold, referring to the singers. ‘And they do not like what they cannot remember. That accounts for the basic truth of folk-song.”
― Wesley Stace, Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer: A Novel

“From the third case, she took yet more books, but these were the traveling books that she had brought for her new ward: they were at once sterner and more reassuring that the others. She cared for for these, too- they were books after all, and she would sooner have her own spine broken than manhandle a book - but not with the same devotion, and they were placed in a neat pile on the floor.”
― Wesley Stace, Misfortune

“I was breathing life into the book through my hand, and the book was breathing back out through me into the world. And what was a book but leather? And what was leather but animal skin? And what was paper but a tree, and vellum but lamb? And what was I but an idea?”
― Wesley Stace, Misfortune

“Ho sempre associato il calore del suo corpo attraverso la camicia da notte al segreto della perfetta torta di zucchero di Barnet.”
― Wesley Stace, Misfortune

“too much detail can have a distancing effect”
― Wesley Stace, Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer

“(These younger composers were generally male, but then composers were almost exclusively male. Even the female composers were almost exclusively male.)”
― Wesley Stace, Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer: A Novel

“Blake laughed at those who extracted deep meaning from Dylan’s lyrics. Agreed, the man was a genius, but only inasmuch as he was the greatest nonsense writer of the late twentieth century. When you added it up—and people often tried (there were plenty of professors waxing lyrical)—the only line connecting Dylan’s work (after his brief flirtation with sense, the folky protest period) was nonsense. He was capable of writing either great nonsense (Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde, most of John Wesley Harding) or sense composed entirely of atrocious clichés (the rest of John Wesley Harding onwards). It was as if Dylan, it seemed to Blake, was only successful when he wrote rubbish. Of course the man didn’t want to explain his lyrics: he couldn’t. Even the best of his narratives were completely nonsensical.”
― Wesley Stace, Wonderkid: A Novel

“I leaned back and glimpsed the stars, the same stories again but written in the sky.”
― Wesley Stace, Misfortune