Ursule Molinaro > Quotes

“His humbled mind drew a blank. & was graced with a revelation. A timid smile dimpled the ear canal, as though god's little finger had suddenly loosened an obtuse bit of wax: Suicide needed to be made accessible to all of suffering humanity. Not only to doctors & dealers.”
― Ursule Molinaro, Thirteen: Stories

“All forms of art demand a discipline that is not unlike praying. That lays a pipeline between the art & the truth.”
― Ursule Molinaro, The Autobiography of Cassandra, Princess & Prophetess of Troy

“A winter storm. dramatic weather of any season often precipitates intimacy: two startled bodies seeking shelter in each other. On her livingroom couch Mrs. Moreno's bunched kimono rises & falls like a silken sea above her drowning Hispanic student.”
― Ursule Molinaro, Thirteen: Stories

“An alien principle took charge when men began administering nature. When priestesses whose moon-based calendar foretold the cycles with minute precision gave way to priests in women’s robes who reckoned by the sun, & left each year awry with one fourth of a useless day.”
― Ursule Molinaro, The Autobiography of Cassandra, Princess & Prophetess of Troy

“I was the victim of both social orders: of Apollo’s waxing patriarchy, & of Clytemnestra’s last spasms of outraged matriarchy. My father Priam probably would have said: that I had asked for it. That no society could be expected to tolerate an individual who insisted on telling the truth.”
― Ursule Molinaro, The Autobiography of Cassandra, Princess & Prophetess of Troy

“Mob is not the plural of man, he said. We’re dealing with a different species, that has kaleidoscopes in the hollows of the eyes. Where projections of violence keep rotating at increasing velocity. Until the prisms shatter with their own frenzy, & the blinded creature collapses in the rubble it has created.”
― Ursule Molinaro, The Autobiography of Cassandra, Princess & Prophetess of Troy

“Knowledge of the future can be a hindrance for living in the present. It makes events seem anticlimactic.”
― Ursule Molinaro, The Autobiography of Cassandra, Princess & Prophetess of Troy

“We tend to underestimate the power of banality.”
― Ursule Molinaro, The Autobiography of Cassandra, Princess & Prophetess of Troy

“I’ll never cease to admire the skill if not the pragmatism of historians & mythographers who manage to blend a number of small truths & probabilities into one large lie. Which hungry hero worshippers swallow whole, without the reservation of a doubt.”
― Ursule Molinaro, The Autobiography of Cassandra, Princess & Prophetess of Troy