Isaac Fellman > Quotes

“...any reasonable person would want to be a librarian.”
― Isaac Fellman, Dead Collections

“There’s wanting to be a guy,” I said. “And there’s not wanting to be a woman. And there’s actually feeling yourself to be a guy, or someone who’s not a woman. They’re all really different, and complicated. Especially when you feel yourself to be a guy, but don’t want to be one. Or when you feel yourself to be one, but you don’t know it, and you don’t even know why you always feel like you’re pretending.” “Which one were you?” “I was the last one. Of course.” “I can’t even imagine what it’s like,” she said. “I used to want so much not to be a woman. But I can’t imagine not being one.”
― Isaac Fellman, Dead Collections

“It's cold in the archives, and there's nobody there. I belong in the archives. I am cold too.”
― Isaac Fellman, Dead Collections

“Those names, Ari and Sol - what is it about Jewish trans men that we all have to reach back to our roots, as if they are the only source of nourishment we have left?”
― Isaac Fellman, Dead Collections

“Getting older is the most goth thing of all.”
― Isaac Fellman, Dead Collections

“It's not weird to make your body yours. It's not weird to want a custom body.”
― Isaac Fellman, Dead Collections

“Not that I was ever really an adolescent, but I had the tenderness of one. That’s what it’s like to be a trans child and not know it. You have all the fragility of adolescence, but none of its resilience, the clever cartilage that always grows back.”
― Isaac Fellman, Dead Collections

“To read at random is to read as if you were thinking. It is the closest thing to calling up a line of poetry that you’ve memorized. And I still find that it’s a good way to work through a novel or a book of poetry or even an informative book. One repeats some parts, but if a book is worth reading it is worth repetition, and it helps you to clear the false cartilage of structure. I am always over-tempted to stretch the skin of a story over that cartilage, however deformed the result may be. Structure is the great southern vice.”
― Rachel Fellman, The Breath of the Sun

“Every object in the world in the world is formed of molecules that have come together by human intention, and now the intention was gone, and the objects were losing their shape.”
― Isaac Fellman, Dead Collections

“It often feels to me as if I need to make every decision very carefully or I’ll get on the wrong path and it will be impossible to work my way back again. Different paths of light streaking off into the distance, but each one is only one, and if I take one, all the others will go out.”
― Isaac Fellman, Dead Collections

“I think you are my last lover. It is so strange that in our lives of searching for love, if we’re monogamous, we are de facto looking for our last lover—the person we’ll have our last orgasm with. We want to know how our lives will turn out, we want to know the ending and we use love’s augury to do that—we tell our future in our lover’s entrails.”
― Isaac Fellman, Dead Collections

“Oh, if you’d been there, you know you would have raised hell,” said Zaffre.

Etoine shrugged. “I guess in the moment, I usually do. I just always expect something to stop me. That’s the trouble I’m afraid of—as if God will stop me. But if God wanted us to not raise hell, he would’ve made natural laws against it. You can’t go mistaking a human law for a natural law.”

“You don’t believe in God,” said Zaffre.

“I don’t really believe in laws either,” he said, and took another bite of the candy.”
― Isaac Fellman, Notes from a Regicide

“I just—when I held you, it was the only thing I've always wanted to do, and yet it wasn't enough, and I know that sex isn't the thing it was missing, but—I want to hold you."
"Why?"
"To keep you still for a moment, and to keep you from hurting yourself, and because I'm cold. Is that enough?”
― Isaac Fellman, Notes from a Regicide

“It’s been so long since I’ve loved a person. I’m not sure if I ever have. I’m not sure if I even loved my mother, when I was little, the way I love you. You are so hot and fierce and strange. … I don’t know if it will ever make sense for us to live together, for us to make anything together, but I know it will always make sense for me to know you. And that is a comfort, that is a great ship upon which I can rest on the waters.”
― Isaac Fellman, Dead Collections

“But I learned from these new books that Southerners think we are really rather sad. They have an idea of a people dwelling on a mountain, inbred, lonely, mysterious; that we ritually climb and descend, and make sacrifices, and burn eternal flames, and send bridal parties from village to village in the spring so men like Daila can impregnate women like me, all in order to placate something implacable. They see our culture as rich, in the same way perhaps that a seam of ancient ore is rich — because of compression and repression. They imagine that we drink a lot, even more than we do (and it is a thing I learned from the bar, that they drink as much as we, that every culture that’s discovered alcohol drinks too much) and that we are poorer than we are because only a few of us sell anything to them.
A melancholy drunken land, a land of storytellers, a land of sly jokes, an Asam-hating land, and nothing like the land I remembered. It was as if someone had constructed a scaffolding around us, and then removed us and written only about the scaffolding. The more I read, the more the materials of the scaffolding — splintered wood, narrow pipes of metal — slid into the hollows of my bones. I knew that the next time I went to the mountain, I would have a stranger’s mind in mine. Though I walked in streets I had known since girlhood, I would never again be able to step upon them without an erudite word in my head and a bracing of metal in my marrow.”
― Rachel Fellman, The Breath of the Sun

“He’s not a bad parent. He tries really hard.” I was still stuck on this idea of my father as a complicated man who required my careful handling, and I was always defensive—however weakly—when someone suggested he was simply bad. “Are we going to judge someone’s quality by their intentions? You’re old enough to understand that good intentions are not the same as being good.”
― Isaac Fellman, Notes from a Regicide

“Sebastienne's plot in the stone yard acquired a plurality of candles--a little city of candles, buildings of different heights and colors like the slums whose narrow row houses were painted in the liveries of their aristocratic owners, and all on fire.”
― Isaac Fellman, Notes from a Regicide

“After the episode was over, I just sat in the dark. The thing was that the episode still had me. You’d expect an old fandom like that, whose purpose was spent, would spill from my mouth like ashes, but it didn’t. Watching those men look at each other, I felt the same longing and fear as I had at fifteen, when my whole life was longing and fear. The difference between me and most teenagers was that I didn’t know what I longed for, and I sure didn’t know what I was afraid of.”
― Isaac Fellman, Dead Collections

“By that point in their lives, they were of the rich class of any oppressed minority that more or less gets away with everything, and which rarely mixes anything but money into the communal cup.”
― Isaac Fellman

“...she never did anything to her canvases-she never mortared pigments, she never slit away layers with the palette knife, she never sharpened a goddamn pencil-without also doing it to herself.”
― Isaac Fellman, Notes from a Regicide

“Not that there wasn’t real shame in what you did, but can’t you see that there’s some amount of grace in the world, some amount of forgiveness for people who want something that’s strange, but that they are given permission to take?”
― Isaac Fellman, Dead Collections

“I wish you’d been my mom,” I said, unable to tell how much I meant and how much was ingratiation. I was always mistaking them for each other. She shook her body, as if throwing something off. “No, no, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.” “But you meant it.” “Griffon, people who’ve been through the things we’ve been through, we learn to say things to other adults that will make them love us. I shouldn’t prompt you for what to say. I shouldn’t be like this. I should wait and earn your trust.”
― Isaac Fellman, Notes from a Regicide

“I have tried to live by making work my life. It has made me step on people - in small and big ways - who just use work as work, and I’ve tried to valorize it, as if I care more about the archives than other people do.”
― Isaac Fellman, Dead Collections

“For the story of their lives in Stephensport, I have relied upon Etoine’s prison memoir. He wrote it when he thought that Zaffre was already dead, and he had nothing ahead but death on the gallows. He had no idea that he would live for decades after that, would outlive her again, would mourn her again.

Autoportrait, Blessé is what he called it: Self-Portrait with a Wound, or Self-Portrait, Injured. Nothing to do with the English “bless” or “blessing,” though you could be forgiven for thinking it, if you imagined my father had any hand for the sliding bow of a multilingual pun, or if you imagined he felt blessed.”
― Isaac Fellman, Notes from a Regicide

“I’d never been in love either, except with television.”
― Isaac Fellman, Dead Collections

“Still, she couldn't resist the thrill of being warned. It made her feel like an astronaut strapping in, or a soldier loading out. The adrenaline of the drop, floating high above some heady city, your parachute packed by unnkown hands, the safety off on your gun, your hands and lips tingling with panic. She was prepared to be afraid of Marec, because she was already afraid of everyone; she'd had practice. What more did he have to offer her in the night market of fear, when she was the richest woman in the world and already owned it all?”
― Isaac Fellman, The Two Doctors Górski

“And they talk like drunks," said Elsie. "Very correct, trying very hard to seem normal. Obviously the mind is there but you're being so careful that you sound like a broken robot.”
― Isaac Fellman, Dead Collections

“You must understand that at all times, I wanted this couple to scoop me into their arms, except for when they did, which was my cue to wriggle and break away and shout at them and run to my room.”
― Isaac Fellman, Notes from a Regicide