Kate Braverman > Quotes

“They will say I smoked cigarettes and marijuana, cursed hoarse as a crow in all my languages, and loved morphine and Demerol and tequila and pulque, women and men. I will shrug my illusion of shoulders and answer that I am a water woman, not a vessel, not something you can sail or charter. I am instead the tributary, the river, the fluid source, and the sea itself. I am all her rainy implications. And what do you, with your rusted compass, know of love?”
― Kate Braverman

“Writing is like hunting. There are brutally cold afternoons with nothing in sight, only the wind and your breaking heart. Then the moment when you bag something big. The entire process is beyond intoxicating.”
― Kate Braverman

“I believed in immaculate conception and spontaneous combustion. I believed in aliens from outer space and vampires, prophecy, and the resurrection of the dead. I had deja vu many times each day. I was thirteen.”
― Kate Braverman, Small Craft Warnings: Stories

“The night stayed outside. She was surprised. She opened her mouth but no sound came out. Instead, blue things flew in, pieces of glass or tin, or necklaces of blue diamond, perhaps. The air was the blue of a pool when there are shadows, when clouds cross the turquoise surface, when you suspect something contagious is leaking, something camouflaged and disrupted. There is only this infected blue enormity, elongating defiantly. The blue that knows you and where you live and it's never going to forget.”
― Kate Braverman

“Just being in a room with myself is almost more stimulation than I can bear.”
― Kate Braverman

“I know California isn't a real destination. You can't get there from New Jersey, not simply by following a line drawn on a map. The process of arrival is more subtle and complex. It involves acts of contrition. You must appease the gods. You must find novel forms of penance. You must tattoo your children and look at the wonder. It's about conjuring and awakening and intuitions you wish you never had.”
― Kate Braverman, Wonders of the West

“The place between actual seasons is filled with tiny roses in transition. There are murders and amputations in the garden. There are choirs on the sandy floors beneath oceans.”
― Kate Braverman, Small Craft Warnings: Stories

“Women have waited millions of years, growing separate as another species, with visions and priorities no man-words, no man-measurements can comprehend.”
― Kate Braverman, Palm Latitudes

“The Peruvian flute music is . . . cool. In this music, they have not yet invented the industrial revolution that leads to excessive punctuality or the failed experiment they call the nuclear family. This is the music of elements, untarnished, unrehearsed.”
― Kate Braverman, Small Craft Warnings: Stories

“You're carrying so much excess baggage,” a therapist she saw only once had told her. He was employing the expensive sifting-of-tea-leaves voice that she holds with utmost contempt.
“Baggage?” Julia had repeated. She stood up. “Like I'm dragging bundles of old clothes? I'm carrying artifacts that breathe fire. I'm talking about a language of smoke. These are three-dimensional creatures that can mate. I'd no more leave them go by the side of the trail than I would my child. I'll carry them until someone amputates my arms.”
― Kate Braverman

“I feel you're far away,” the man might say. He is observing you, calculating, forming equations he may take to a representative of the patriarchy, such as a doctor, a lawyer, or military official. He is considering physical incarceration and/or biochemical imprisonments such as occur with antidepressants. He is dangerous.
This is a juncture where you may smile. This is optional. You might allow your lips to form the ambiguous seductive shape of slow regret. Or let your mouth fill with too much night, incinerated maple leaves and fox teeth. What you mean is, not yet.”
― Kate Braverman

“All good writing is built one good line at a time. You build a novel the same way you do a pyramid. One word, one stone at a time, underneath a full moon while the fingers bleed.”
― Kate Braverman

“It's not platinum, which suggests constellations and redemption. It's another yellow entirely. Asthma yellow. It comes from rotting petals and camera flashes that permanently scar your face. It leaks from clusters of stucco that remind me of blisters and lumps you get on your lips from kissing the wrong people.”
― Kate Braverman

“Now I know all city parks are the same. Hyde Park. The bluffs above Santa Monica. The Tuileries. Just paths beneath trees where people walk in varying states of heartbreak. Staggering between divorces and biopsies. And at the edge, one final row of lavender azaleas.”
― Kate Braverman

“Los Angeles, brutal claustrophobic basin of delusion and ripoff, clutter, eerie, sticky, horrible. They came, they saw and wend blind. O hallucination of urban gray slabs. . . . Poor ruined sunsore and sadness for demented City of Angels, of white torment and hideous albino predator birds.”
― Kate Braverman, Lithium for Medea

“I’ve always lived here, by the sea. I was a beach brat. I was born riding the peak of a crest of a wave. I was born with salt in my eyes. No, I mean it. I was conceived right down there on that beach. Six years old and surfing. It’s all that sea in me. That’s what makes my eyes change color. I’ve got waves inside. The ocean runs through me, man.”
― Kate Braverman, Lithium for Medea: A Novel

“I am learning how to mother. . . . I am distilling entire moral universes into single lines.”
― Kate Braverman, Squandering the Blue: Stories

“Los Angeles is like a white world, filled with ever smaller white circles, leading to some perfect white core. Los Angeles is where the angels with their white capped teeth and their white tennis dresses, gradually edged closer to the pure center, ambrosia, the fountain of youth.”
― Kate Braverman, Lithium for Medea

“My father is taking me to my first baseball game. The Philadelphia Athletics are playing. I feel I've been sitting on my strange hard seat for a long time. I stand up. It is the National Anthem.
"I want to go home now," I tell my father.
He is looking down at the big green field. "But the game hasn't started yet," he says.
Then he shrugs. He laughs and his laughter is big like the wind. "O.K., kid. O.K."
And he takes my by the hand and leads me out of the stadium.”
― Kate Braverman, Lithium for Medea

“Los Angeles. . . . It was some sort of organic ruin, an accident of architecture and brutal necessity. The iridescence was somehow almost legible, suggesting a calligraphy of exposed bone, transparencies, experimental skin grafts. The blood of Los Angeles was a red neon wash, a kind of sea of autistic traffic lights.”
― Kate Braverman, Lithium for Medea

“It occurred to her, suddenly, that the Chinese took poets as concubines. Their poets slept with warlords. They wrote with gold ink. They ate orchids and smoked opium. They were consecrated by nuance, by birds and silk and the ritual birthdays of gods and nothing changed for a thousand years. And afternoon was absinthe yellow and almond, burnt orange and chrysanthemum. And in the abstract sky, a litany of kites.”
― Kate Braverman

“walking on boulevards and beaches, examining postcards, studying angles of light and shadow”
― Kate Braverman, A Good Day for Seppuku: Stories

“It is always a poet's winter.”
― Kate Braverman, Squandering the Blue: Stories

“Francisca recognized that she was decoding an entire process, detail by detail. She was learning a certain alphabet, a geography, a language which would become a revelation. This compelled her to stay. There were artifacts everywhere. She was assembling a lost civilization. When she viewed it in its entirety, she would become someone else.”
― Kate Braverman

“Experience can't be reduced to a 4x6 inch still," her mother says. "People stick their loves in cellophane prisons. They incarcerate images. Then they put these cemeteries on coffee tables. They're mockeries.”
― Kate Braverman, A Good Day for Seppuku: Stories

“You can't know a father. They're all magicians. Got two million years of strings and mirrors in their pockets.”
― Kate Braverman, A Good Day for Seppuku: Stories

“Women have waited millions of years growing separate as another species, with visions and priorities no man-words, no man-measurements can comprehend.”
― Kate Braverman, Palm Latitudes

“It was winter, winds were stirring. The Santa Anas which come from the desert beyond the city. . . . I understood exactly what God was saying. . . . Behold, you are insignificant and flawed.”
― Kate Braverman, Palm Latitudes

“Location is a magical word. I used to believe it was related to cancer, that's one of the cancer questions. Where is the location? I think of location as being a word that falls somewhere between cancer and real estate.”
― Kate Braverman, Wonders of the West

“This southern city which seems only peripherally and accidentally America. This city which was once an outpost of Spain and once a region of Mexico. This city webbed with boulevards bearing the names of Spanish psychotics and saints. This incomplete city which seems to have no recognizable past, no ground that could be called unassailably sacred. This incomplete city that speaks of an impending terror.”
― Kate Braverman, Palm Latitudes