Sondra Charbadze > Quotes

“In a culture where the brain is considered the center of consciousness, an unraveling brain is an unraveling self. To let the mentally unstable live in our midst is to face the fearful fragility of the ego. So we whisper our fears over their heads, driving them into the wilderness of the streets or locking them away where they can’t be seen. We let them pale into husks of
human beings, cut off from the mutual blood of society. Sometimes we toss them a coin; it’s a small price to pay for the relief of looking away.”
― Sondra Charbadze, The Sea Once Swallowed Me: A Memoir of Love, Solitude, and the Limits of Language

“Where does the pain go when we die?
does it stay in the bed as it begins to stink—
does it racket through the home like a scream—
do the children inherit it like a sprawling estate—
And where does it go while we live?

Maybe the pain is like me, desperate to be seen in the lives of those around me. I will abandon others again and again until I can finally be free of my own abandonment.”
― Sondra Charbadze, The Sea Once Swallowed Me: A Memoir of Love, Solitude, and the Limits of Language

“We often assume the religious are superstitious, but maybe they are performance artists instead, embodying ideas which wander namelessly—dangerously—through the psyche.”
― Sondra Charbadze, The Sea Once Swallowed Me: A Memoir of Love, Solitude, and the Limits of Language

“We have all eaten of the fruit of life, not knowing we have swallowed its death-seeds. The seeds sprout into weeds tall as trees, choking. Smothered or not by distraction or belief, this we share: death as a shared feast, suffering as our communal drink.”
― Sondra Charbadze, The Sea Once Swallowed Me: A Memoir of Love, Solitude, and the Limits of Language

“And here I am before the sea, being crushed again beneath the foam of former things. But is anything former when we speak of love or pain or any great and breaking thing?”
― Sondra Charbadze, The Sea Once Swallowed Me: A Memoir of Love, Solitude, and the Limits of Language

“We are bathed in the same sky...We are bound by the same atmosphere which bifurcates our bodies. Somehow, this distance between our feet is a shared belonging.”
― Sondra Charbadze, The Sea Once Swallowed Me: A Memoir of Love, Solitude, and the Limits of Language

“There are no great answers and no grand solutions. There are only small things that split open, revealing their seeds.”
― Sondra Charbadze, The Sea Once Swallowed Me: A Memoir of Love, Solitude, and the Limits of Language

“Pain is always the origin of the ecstatic, that first spilling out of the body. We spill out of our mothers—bloodly, screaming, and then forever after are trying to keep ourselves un-spilled, untainted by great
and breaking pain (and thus love, and thus joy).”
― Sondra Charbadze

“Can an unnamed thing be said to exist? Yes, but we can’t speak of it even in hushed voices. We can only dance around the invisible enemy. We can only evade.”
― Sondra Charbadze, The Sea Once Swallowed Me: A Memoir of Love, Solitude, and the Limits of Language

“I sit for a long stretch of time, focusing on that pain like an original point, like the early ache of displacement that explodes into the shape of our lives, like the fires which rage around us for the entirety of our days, threatening to swallow us blank. But as I wrap my breath around that original point, as I sink deeper and deeper into the loss, I feel a shiver like presence. I squint and imagine the pit splintering open. A spot of red at the center: Is this joy?”
― Sondra Charbadze, The Sea Once Swallowed Me: A Memoir of Love, Solitude, and the Limits of Language

“This is another way of saying that “now” is nothing but a gathering place where the past, present, and future congeal, fester, and proliferate. To be a seer is to know that these three time-persons are a single Holy Trinity. The Holy comes not from a singular time-body, but from all three: Squatting in the gathering place. Breaking bread. Laughing.”
― Sondra Charbadze, The Sea Once Swallowed Me: A Memoir of Love, Solitude, and the Limits of Language

“A thousand men could not keep me warm. My soulmate is the totality of the teeming earth.”
― Sondra Charbadze, The Sea Once Swallowed Me: A Memoir of Love, Solitude, and the Limits of Language

“Death, like God, is still much too big for us. If this book were bare as a clean-picked bone, each syllable would point to that desolate beauty. But a book is built of words, and words imply a Great Struggling to Understand. Death laughs outside the boundaries of human understanding. While we huddle in libraries and houses, apartments and churches, parks and
cafés, Struggling to Understand, death chomps sedately on our bones, lazy with victory.”
― Sondra Charbadze, The Sea Once Swallowed Me: A Memoir of Love, Solitude, and the Limits of Language

“Writing is secondary speech and speech is secondary being. This Gaudí knew: that creation must be born of theophany (communion with the silence beneath beings and identities).”
― Sondra Charbadze, The Sea Once Swallowed Me: A Memoir of Love, Solitude, and the Limits of Language

“Some memories are second skins, scenes we inhabit—seen or unseen—for the duration of our lives.”
― Sondra Charbadze, The Sea Once Swallowed Me: A Memoir of Love, Solitude, and the Limits of Language

“They were too afraid to see,” I say, nodding.

See what? the stone does not say.

A smile breaks my face like an anomaly. “See me.”

The stone says nothing. But I watch it as it glints in the sun. I watch it with corpse-like curiosity until my brain stops thinking and I remember to breathe.”
― Sondra Charbadze, The Sea Once Swallowed Me: A Memoir of Love, Solitude, and the Limits of Language

“I want to tell him that I learned to write when I was barely old enough to read, because the pain took me straight out of my body, both evading and yet demanding speech. I want to show him where it dropped me: the wasteland where words pant dry, where meanings wander hollowed of their sound-bodies, where new-born and unnamed realities mouth hungrily towards the sun, waiting to be seen into meaning.”
― Sondra Charbadze, The Sea Once Swallowed Me: A Memoir of Love, Solitude, and the Limits of Language

“This is love, I think, to hold a name carefully between the teeth, to hold without swallowing.”
― Sondra Charbadze, The Sea Once Swallowed Me: A Memoir of Love, Solitude, and the Limits of Language

“I rebelled by spending time with the men instead, but I carried the teachings in my very own body: only a man matters. A woman means nothing unless she can edge her way into a man’s story. This is how oppression thrives in disguise: We pass the lies to our children, embracing away their strength. We teach them the same old story, even when the script has run dry. We think we have long since rejected society’s boundaries because we own our own thoughts and desires. But we own nothing. We are carried always in a larger tide.”
― Sondra Charbadze

“Men shrink before me like they shrink before the cathedral-clad glance of God, because power and potential are born in my body, because worlds arch from my eyes.”
― Sondra Charbadze

“Maybe if I can allow Death to eat with me, in the dirt, sharing my beans and bread with soil-dampened fingers, if I can allow her into my garden, to sit with me squarely and matter-of-factly on a blue bench, if I can climb into her dark womb and allow her to contract me out into the bracing air of life—

Maybe then I will be brave enough to stay sane,
and by sane, I mean alive, and by alive, I mean in procreative communion with Death.”
― Sondra Charbadze, The Sea Once Swallowed Me: A Memoir of Love, Solitude, and the Limits of Language

“A living corpse. A phrase which has hatched behind my eyes (seemingly without thought) and now lives as a hot pulsation in my brain as I walk, write, and sleep. I have been told that there is a miniature death in every breath: the millisecond after inhale and before exhale, when we hang in the hollow spaceless. This is another way of saying that we are all of us resurrected beings, and all of us not, our corpses sliding tight behind us in the vernix of birth.”
― Sondra Charbadze, The Sea Once Swallowed Me: A Memoir of Love, Solitude, and the Limits of Language

“Love is a gathering of minutiae. Stones, dirt particles, the waxing/waning light, goat’s milk, chamomile,
and honey. I am learning the excruciating art of attention, my small gift of sight to the world. The wider the world, the smaller I seem. This smallness is relieving. Concerns, like the self, are pebbles to be tossed into the sea.”
― Sondra Charbadze, The Sea Once Swallowed Me: A Memoir of Love, Solitude, and the Limits of Language

“A woman’s body is the origin of the symbolic, I think, as I watch the bright red spots blacken the dirt. Our blood the origin of the thought: this must mean something. I imagine the first man who saw a woman bleed. She is dying! But the bleeding stops, she lives another month and repeats. We bleed and survive. Can a man be anything but terrified?”
― Sondra Charbadze

“Nothing is lost here, in this place before language, before longing. The love is the same, after all. Only the names change.”
― Sondra Charbadze, The Sea Once Swallowed Me: A Memoir of Love, Solitude, and the Limits of Language

“A hunger to be small as a scrap of light, warming
strangers without being seen, to be lost in the crack between cobblestones, in the sliver of space between lovemaking bodies, to be nothing more concrete than the exhalation of dust from a book. The urge to be obliterated and yet held on the surface of the skin: this is the paradox of the oppressed.”
― Sondra Charbadze, The Sea Once Swallowed Me: A Memoir of Love, Solitude, and the Limits of Language

“After all, the Infinite must exist in our crippled bird bodies somehow, and not as I kiss Luca on the castle grounds, or jump on the bridge to see the black and gold waters moving beneath my feet. But mundanely, humanely, as I drink tea outside a café, scribbling scraps of dialogue on a blank sheet of paper as people and pigeons pass, as the great lemon orb floods the ancient buildings and streets with illumination, as it rises to illustrate how petty are my scribblings, how small I and all these people-props appear before the harsh benevolence of its light.”
― Sondra Charbadze, The Sea Once Swallowed Me: A Memoir of Love, Solitude, and the Limits of Language

“This is how the earth and sky meet: a stretching of time, a suspension of space. Obliteration, maybe. Is this how we meet ourselves?”
― Sondra Charbadze, The Sea Once Swallowed Me: A Memoir of Love, Solitude, and the Limits of Language

“I know now that the past tense is a cruel deception. Anything real is now and forever engraved on our bodies.”
― Sondra Charbadze, The Sea Once Swallowed Me: A Memoir of Love, Solitude, and the Limits of Language

“But I just smile. Because I know now that none of us know what we want. Not until we know that we live and breathe and have our being in a web of others’ wanting.”
― Sondra Charbadze, The Sea Once Swallowed Me: A Memoir of Love, Solitude, and the Limits of Language