Rick Gekoski > Quotes

“Reading is how we learn to attach ourselves to ourselves, and to others, and to the world: reading inhabits us with the tendrils of love.”
― Rick Gekoski, Outside of a Dog: A Bibliomemoar

“You can't simply put a book down or away.”
― Rick Gekoski, Outside of a Dog: A Bibliomemoar

“To look at those (few) books in the dawning recognition that what they furnish is not a room, but a self.”
― Rick Gekoski, Outside of a Dog: A Bibliomemoar

“What is so addictive about fiction is that it is the one reliable place in which we can apprehend and participate in - fully understand - the inward world of another person.”
― Rick Gekoski, Outside of a Dog: A Bibliomemoar

“If you will read and listen, you will admit a multiplicity of voices and points of view, consider them with some humility, allow them gracious entrance however strident or discordant some of them may sound, then you will grow and change, and each of these voices will become a constituent part of who you become, an atom of growing being.
It is literature and only literature than can do this.”
― Rick Gekoski, Darke

“I haven't re-read Kafka for forty years. I had a second read-through when first teaching English at the University of Warwick in the 1970s, but since then have not been tempted to return. The reason for this, I suspect, is that he is a young person's writer, not in the sense that only the young can appreciate him, but because on first exposure he is so comprehensively and unexpectedly formative that you may never feel the need to read him again. He becomes part of you, and your mind and spirit and view of the human condition are inhabited by his stories, his views, and especially his characters: by poor persecuted Josef K., by Gregor Samsa trapped in his rotting shell, by the hunger artist, yearning to find something, anything, that is actually good to eat, by poor K., who can't get into the castle to visit the Authorities. Kafkaesque: a world incomprehensible, alienating and threatening, absurd. We visit it with incomprehension and at our peril, lost at all points, disorientated, inoculated against faith, searchers for meaning in a book - and universe that either has none, or in which it lurks inaccessibly. Once you have read Kafka, you know this.”
― Rick Gekoski, Lost, Stolen or Shredded: Stories of Missing Works of Art and Literature

“...begged them as we read our literary texts, only to listen. To wrench open - it takes an effort of will - the portcullis to their teenage hearts for just a couple of hours once a week, to humbly admit another, and better - a Yeats or Shakespeare, a Crazy Jane or Hamlet - and to welcome them, to allow for those tiny spots of time some vibration in the jelly of being, that makes, once it has settled, a subtle new mould... Otherwise, I would observe tartly...you are merely going to become a product of your family, the few friends you might make and the few lovers you may garner...nothing more than a function of your upbringing - a type. Whereas, if you will only read, and listen, you will admit a multiplicity of voices and points of view, consider them with some humility, allow them gracious entrance however strident or discordant some of them may sound, then you will grow and change, and each of these voices will become a constituent part of who you become, an atom of growing being.
It is literature and only literature than can do this.”
― Rick Gekoski, Darke

“think I will never feel normal again, or do simple things with simple pleasure. An anchor is tugging at my chest, and I feel if I don’t resist I will be pulled under, and my heart will drown.”
― Rick Gekoski, Darke

“Reading exposes is to the experiences and minds of others, makes us challenge our own provinciality, deepens and widens who we are and what we can become.”
― Rick Gekoski, Darke

“Composing verses is a reprehensible and self-regarding activity, likely to lead to the most appalling psychic inflation: I am a poet! As if the moniker established a kind of wisdom, or enticed more partners into your bed.”
― Rick Gekoski, Darke

“At exactly 10 a.m. the next Thursday, when her session would have been starting, Suzy went into the study, gathered the few pages of the new novel, and threw them in the bin. She had very little idea what to replace them with, except that it was not going to be set in India. It didn’t go well, but Suzy rather expected that, was reconciled to it. Her depression had been transformed, as Freud had recommended, into ordinary unhappiness. That was fine with Suzy: makers of things are necessarily unhappy, it goes with the job description.”
― Rick Gekoski, Darke

“He won't remember any of this, he's too young and it's too painful. Children are wonderfully self-preserving. They filter memory, cleanse and sanitise it, unless it's too awful to renounce. And this isn't. Or is it? These gummy spots of time that inextricably adhere when so much more is erased, how do we account for their tenacity?”
― Rick Gekoski, Darke

“Most old people can’t sleep, they wake in the night, get up and eat toast and marmalade, go back to bed, sleep fitfully, dream a little. In fact, we sleep more than we know, for Suzy often shook me to stop my snoring, when I was perfectly clear that I was wide awake, and thinking.”
― Rick Gekoski, Darke