Rikki Ducornet > Quotes

“What are books but tangible dreams? What is reading if it is not dreaming? The best books cause us to dream; the rest are not worth reading.”
― Rikki Ducornet, The Fan-Maker's Inquisition: A Novel of the Marquis de Sade

“A book is a private thing, citizen; it belongs to the one who writes it and to the one who reads it. Like the mind itself, a book is a private space. Within that space, anything is possible. The greatest evil and the greatest good.”
― Rikki Ducornet, The Fan-Maker's Inquisition: A Novel of the Marquis de Sade

“Next I prayed to Allah, whose ears are deaf; then did I beseech his fallen twin, the Devil Hornprick, who sits upon his thorn of fire, gloating upon his constellations and counting his bloody seeds. In Baclava it is said Hornprick once caught a glimpse of the First Woman, as she sat singing to her snake in her chamber of sacred mud. Dazzled by her sight, the light of love and lust, he fell. He is still falling. For all eternity her breasts orbit his dreams.”
― Rikki Ducornet, Contemporary Surrealist Prose Volume 1

“The child is born speaking the languages of birds; the child has horns and scales and wings; it has a beak; it has a cloven hoof. He is the sum of all creatures: the ones that swim, the ones that soar, the ones that leap, the ones that maze the earth with burrows.”
― Rikki Ducornet, Netsuke

“I am a wheel. As I rise, Sweetheart, I carry you along with me, a heady, dizzying spin toward the sweet oceans of eternity. On wings of flames we sink into the sea of love. May be burn forever like bees in honey. Who does not wish for that delirium to last forever?”
― Rikki Ducornet

“All things pass, all things, that is, but mystery.”
― Rikki Ducornet

“I like to imagine that Adam's tongue, his palate and his lips were always on fire, that the air he breathed was kindled to incandescence each time he cried out in sorrow or delight. If fiction can be said to have a function, it is to release that primary fury of which language, even now, is miraculously capable - from the dry mud of daily use. So that furred, spotted and striped, it may - as it did in Eden - scrawl under every tree as revelation.”
― Rikki Ducornet, The Jade Cabinet

“Like the moon, the novel is a symbol and a necessary reality. Ideally it serves neither gods nor masters. Philosopher’s stone, it sublimates, precipitates, and quickens. House of Keys, it opens all our darkest doors. May the Pol Pot Persons of all genders and denominations take heed: to create a fictional world with rigor and passion, to imagine a character of any sex, place, time, or color and make it palpitate and quiver, to catapult it into the deepest forests of our most luminous reveries, is to commit an act of empathy. To write a novel of the imagination is a gesture of tenderness; to enter the body of a book is a fearless act and generous.”
― Rikki Ducornet, The Monstrous and the Marvelous

“Luckless is that country in which the symbols of procreation are held in horror!' he wrote, 'while the agents of destruction are revered!”
― Rikki Ducornet, The Fan-Maker's Inquisition: A Novel of the Marquis de Sade

“Truth is a leper banished from the hearts of men and rotting away in exile. All that is left is corruption, a bad smell, some unnameable pieces of what was once a thing lucent and good.”
― Rikki Ducornet, The Fan-Maker's Inquisition: A Novel of the Marquis de Sade

“An important memory is like a gravitational field--the mind is compelled to return to it again and again. It is like a moon; it lives in light and shadow.”
― Rikki Ducornet, Gazelle

“My pen is the key to a fantastic bordello, and once the gate is opened, it ejaculates a bloody ink. The virgin paper set to shriek evokes worlds heretofore unknown: eruptive, incorruptible, suffocating.”
― Rikki Ducornet, The Fan-Maker's Inquisition: A Novel of the Marquis de Sade

“The world is brimming with plaster replicas, and the point is to smash them to bits, to create an upheaval so acute it cannot be anticipated or resisted.”
― Rikki Ducornet, The Fan-Maker's Inquisition: A Novel of the Marquis de Sade

“And I cannot help but wonder as we navigate the realms of our own manufacture, will we remember how to cherish one another, or will these realms turn out to be far too self-referential, a kind of beautifully furnished tomb, a mind loop, a mirror reflecting a mirror-offering a vista that can only induce dizziness, longing, and loneliness?”
― Rikki Ducornet, The Deep Zoo

“The purpose of myth, therefore, is to both reveal and conceal. To tell what we have seen and disguise it, to mask God's forked tongue.”
― Rikki Ducornet, The Fountains of Neptune

“What is the sea for the man who has loved and left her? She is fire-water, whisky, rum, a roric flame. She is a green-eyed witch; she speaks in tongues. Her coral rings are forged of skeletons; her white shoulders glisten with the dust of powdered bones.
She is memory, the number of numbers, the eye of the world, the mirror of the sea. What is the ocean for the sailor who has loved and left her? The one lover who dissolves the night. A bottomless glass of moonshine.
And sailors? All sea-talkers. The sons of mermen.”
― Rikki Ducornet, The Fountains of Neptune

“I, sole heir to the Munodi line and memory, am childless. A friend who knows such things has told me that this explains my compulsion to capture what I can with black ink on white paper." ("The Volatilized Ceiling of Baron Munodi")”
― Rikki Ducornet

“The world is a translation of the divine, and its manifestation. To write a text is to propose a reading of the world and reveal its potencies”
― Rikki Ducornet, The Deep Zoo

“Nature knows no Moral Order. Nature doesn't give a fig for social conventions or ethical questions. And God cannot respond to or repair evil, because He is not there to witness it.”
― Rikki Ducornet, The Fan-Maker's Inquisition: A Novel of the Marquis de Sade

“Terrible things happen all the time, he thinks, but not today. Terrible things, beautiful things, things of such power, of such bewilderment, lucent and dark as tar. But right now the universe, restless beyond imagining, a universe of rock and flame, whose nature is incandescence—a universe that flickers, its impatient forms blinking like fireflies in the night—astounds and delights him.”
― Rikki Ducornet, Brightfellow

“He carries his dislocation like broken wings on his back, oblivious to the wealth of life in the sky, the trees, the air.”
― Rikki Ducornet

“What is the sea for the man who has loved and left her? She is fire-water, whisky, rum, a roric flame. She is a green-eyed witch; she speaks in tongues. Her coral rings are forged of skeletons; her white shoulders glisten with the dust of powdered bones.

She is memory, the number of numbers, the eye of the world, the mirror of the sea. What is the ocean for the sailor who has loved and left her? The one lover who dissolves the night. A bottomless glass of moonshine.

And sailors? All sea-talkers. The sons of mermen.”
― Rikki Ducornet, The Fountains of Neptune

“I knew Donald Fagan at Bard. He was wildly gifted. He gave me a phone number which I never used and I guess I lost! Philosophically it's an interesting song; I mean I think his 'number' is a cipher for the self.”
― Rikki Ducornet

“The texts we write are not visible until they are written. Like a creature coaxed from out a deep wood, the text reveals itself little by little.”
― Rikki Ducornet, The Deep Zoo

“I've often wondered if Morality is an attribute of Reason. Of course, evil is always buttressed by 'reasonable' arguments. Yet, what if True Reason is an attribute of Morality, and True Morality an attribute of Reason?”
― Rikki Ducornet, The Fan-Maker's Inquisition: A Novel of the Marquis de Sade

“That night Charter dreams he is a man made of paper. Lifted by the wind, he floats above a paper city, its windows, doors, bricks, and roof tiles all printed in colored inks. He wants to be dropped into the streets; he wants to wander among the shops and houses. But he is held suspended in the air without bone or muscle, a victim of the wind. He looks down at the city and calls for help.

And then he gets his wish. He is dropped to the street and sees the walls of the city rise all around him. He wills himself to stand. But he is made of paper and can only lie on his back with the knowledge that sooner or later someone will step on his heart.”
― Rikki Ducornet, Brightfellow

“He appreciates the night and its wandering points of light, its lawns turned the color of blackberry jelly, its gravel smoothed to tweed, its owls tearing at the throats of mice. He is bountiful with love.

If America has gods, this is where they dwell—under rocks, in the branches of trees, in ivy, skunkweed, the hearts of fish, the flight of geese.”
― Rikki Ducornet

“A fan is like the thighs of a woman: It opens and closes. A good fan opens with a flick of the wrist. It produces its own weather---a breeze not so strong as to muss the hair.”
― Rikki Ducornet, The Fan-Maker's Inquisition: A Novel of the Marquis de Sade