Missouri Williams > Quotes

“looking into her bruised face the schoolmaster thought that the history of the world was the history of cruelty, that it had never been anything else: they limped along the great curve of extinction, one foot in the void, dwindling each year and it was cruelty that made them cling on, pain and the paining of others that kept them moving”
― Missouri Williams, The Doloriad

“...and one day the rain would wash them away entirely, the sounds of the dead city and her memories of them, and then the Matriarch would finally be free of it—the past and its language.”
― Missouri Williams, The Doloriad

“...the way that the words hung together to produce meaning had a logic that he could not follow, and sometimes he thought that this was because they spoke in images, immediate, sensuous images, that their minds had escaped the temporal relationships that had defined the language of the past and instead they lived in an eternal, causeless present, a world of pure simultaneity.”
― Missouri Williams, The Doloriad

“She was overflowing with emptiness, like a glass full of foam, and this, she said, was the source of all her problems. It was what compelled her to eat in the way that she did, which was excessively, and ensured that every single effort to rectify the problem failed. Every deficiency of the body is matched by a deficiency of the soul.”
― Missouri Williams, The Vivisectors

“...the story of the city was always a story of disintegration.”
― Missouri Williams, The Doloriad

“...her pores are so small that her complexion is positively matte, and she's already read The Critique of Pure Reason, and, whats more, understood it too.”
― Missouri Williams, The Doloriad

“Editing is so vacant that it’s almost holy. You’re not supposed to bring any of yourself to the text in front of you; instead, you are meant to be the conduit for a great and impersonal ideal, something like objectivity. Or rather it is that editing requires a focusing of attention so absolute that it makes your personhood into even more of a hindrance than usual. You have to erase yourself in service of another person or what you imagine their intentions to be.”
― Missouri Williams, The Vivisectors

“I admired the decay of the house and the city around it but I feared the decay of the body without ever really understanding why.”
― Missouri Williams, The Vivisectors

“But being in pain has never bothered me. I have always been able to control my impulses.”
― Missouri Williams, The Vivisectors

“[B]ecause I knew that despite everything that had happened the thing I still did best was act the audience.”
― Missouri Williams, The Vivisectors

“[...] they limped along the great curve of extinction, one foot in the void, dwindling each year, and it was cruelty that made them cling on, pain and the paining of others that kept them moving [...]”
― Missouri Williams

“When Agathe reached for the hatred, all she found was a small black stone that she held in her mouth and pushed around with her tongue.”
― Missouri Williams, The Doloriad

“(...) the sinewy brown lines that marked the distinctness of her brother's leg from the world around it, blazoning the simple ownership that is the gift of a border, were lost, and what had been the leg and whatever had belonged to the leg alone dribbled away into the earth. She could no longer tell what was leg and what was dirt.”
― Missouri Williams, The Doloriad