Victoria Redel > Quotes

“Sometimes I think we need to tell our stories more than anyone needs to hear our stories. Maybe just so that anticipation or happiness can be reached for again. But other times it is almost as if the story itself wants repeating. So that the strand of hair caught in a kiss or the turn of a beautiful face isn't lost forever. So that, especially when it comes to beauty, we're not alone and left with the burden of remembering.”
― Victoria Redel, The Border of Truth

“Tell me what you need to tell me but keep far away from my son who
still loves a beautiful thing not for what it means—
this way or that—but for the way facets set off prisms and prisms spin up
everywhere
and from his own jeweled body he’s cast rainbows—made every shining
true color.

Now try to tell me—man or woman—your heart was ever once that brave.”
― Victoria Redel

“The exceptional happens quietly, inside the mundane.”
― Victoria Redel, Before Everything

“He said I must pay special attention in cars. He wasn’t, he assured me, saying that I’d be in an accident but that for two weeks some particular caution was in order, &, he said, all I really needed to do was throw the white light of Alma around any car I entered & then I’d be fine. & when I asked about Alma, he said, Oh, come on, you know Alma well. You two were together first in Egypt & then at Stonehenge, & I nodded though I’ve never been— in this life at least—to Stonehenge; then I said, Shouldn’t I always throw the white light of Alma around a car? & when he said, Well, it wouldn’t hurt, I said, What about around planes, houses? What if I throw the white light of Alma around anyone who might need protection from the reckless speed of driving or the reckless swerve & skid of the world? & the psychic opened his hands & shrugged up his shoulders. So despite your doubt or mine as to why I’d gone there, to a psychic, in—I kid you not—a town of psychics—in the first place, right now, as you read this, let me throw the white light of Alma around you & everyone you pass close to today, beloved or stranger, the grocer, the bus driver, the boy on his longboard, the lady you stand silent beside in the elevator, & also I am throwing it around anyone they care about anywhere in the spin of the world, because, we can agree that these days, everywhere, particular caution is in order &, even if unverifiable, the light of my dear sister Alma, couldn’t hurt.”
― Victoria Redel

“This is life. Once it was hers. Then it was ours. Now it is mine.”
― Victoria Redel, I Am You

“Who among us comes through life without regret? Without apology? How often do we create the fire we must step into and hopefully through? And if we are lucky emerge charred, we must then survive coarsely scarred and patched. And still longing. That's love. Difficult to reckon that something so burnt and crusted with anger and hurt can still be called love.”
― Victoria Redel, I Am You

“But if you've never cared enduringly for another, than I can't suppose you know the ways love can also be stingy and mean.”
― Victoria Redel, I Am You

“...Anyway I hate nature,' she said. It was one of her favorite outrageous claims. That she detested the mess of nature. That it was always preferable to paint lily or wild rose in the studio. The freedom to create a bouquet of flowers that bloomed in different months was her justification. The second was that an arrangement and vase implied a human presence even if not visible in the painting. To her that particular human, who didn't appear on canvas, was her true subject.”
― Victoria Redel, I Am You

“We are here. And then we are not here. For a little while, we are a story.

...layers of lived life...”
― Victoria Redel, Before Everything

“I was so many things and none of them. Sometimes it made me unsteady. What did it mean to know my place, or to make my place? And what was our place—Maria's and mine?”
― Victoria Redel, I Am You