George Barker > Quotes

“What I wish above everything at this moment is that I could save myself the pain of seeing the pain on your face.”
― George Barker, The Dead Seagull

“Street Ballad

From high above the birds look down and sing because
they see
the monstrous comedies they miss, living several storeys
higher:
the dirty degradations and the gross humiliations,
they, like the gods, without pity, look down upon from a
telephone wire.

but as they sit there high above and gaze down upon our
brutal
short and messy circumstances, they do not see the one
who stands behind a cardboard tree examining them
coldly
with one eye closed and the other staring along the barrel
of a gun.”
― George Barker

“There are simple souls, I believe, who find it hard to understand why the unenterprising Eve should have plucked the apple: the reason, and your life, my dear Mardsen, quite nobly and simply desmonstrates this, is threefold. The lady wanted an apple, she did not mind taking it, and was not ashamed when she had eaten it. Because it gives her a bellyache that evolves a world, But, oh my God, where was the individual will of the undersigned when that nude bitch under the tree held up her hand with a sprouting womb in it?
The will of the captive is free in a box of mirrors. The will of the lover is free inside the seed. The will of the woman is free inside her desire to die into the next generation.

For freedom is the knowledge of necessity, and the necessity of existence is two sinning in a bed, and the necessity of two sinning in a bed is to be forgiven. It is thus that our only freedom is to be damned.”
― George Barker, The Dead Seagull