Deb Olin Unferth > Quotes

“You know how it is to want something. Desire builds like a little house in your head and it sits there, half-constructed in your mind. Women who want children are this way. Artists are this way about pictures. It doesn't go away. You may forget for a few months but then it's back, the unfinished pieces of what you want.”
― Deb Olin Unferth, Vacation

“Humans, we just hop out of things, off things. We splatter ourselves in inappropriate places. Because we have nothing to live for. Because we want to destroy what we can. Because we want to be something we can’t. Because we don’t really believe we can die.”
― Deb Olin Unferth, Vacation

“It takes bravery to care for someone — no matter who he is or what made him, whether he is weak or walking or jumping out of windows. The risk involved is enormous.”
― Deb Olin Unferth, Vacation

“People are fakers--that's all we do. Can you think of anything you do that's not done for the precise reason of pretending to be something you're afraid you're not?”
― Deb Olin Unferth, Vacation

“The utterly empty bottle of his soul.”
― Deb Olin Unferth, Vacation

“If you think about it, everyone is behind someone and in front of someone. The nature of the sphere, right? No one gets left at the end or is forced to take the lead, and in this way you might say the shape of the earth is democratic. There are hesitations, of course. There are lines going in ways that you wouldn’t imagine. People are passed up or passed over. The tempo is irregular and messy. If you thought about the entirety of it, the legs, the back and forth, it’s a fiasco, an anarchy of steps. It’s impossible. And there’s no way to tidy it or make it in any way manageable, not in one’s imagination or anywhere else.”
― Deb Olin Unferth, Vacation

“His rage was a saw, going back and forth, cutting through arteries, hers.”
― Deb Olin Unferth, Vacation

“Now, I’ve been eating the pretzels with my wife since we met in 1962 and I don’t think they are especially good. I certainly don’t think they are “thicker,” but she had been eating them far longer than I, and she insisted the formula had changed, or perhaps the machinery, and that as a result they were very slightly “thicker,” and she would no longer eat them and complained about them for months. She tried to call the manufacturer but got only recorded voice greetings. She wrote emails and even letters but nobody answered. My wife is not one to give up on a thing and I’d be hearing about it until I died. So one day I was looking at the package, while she complained behind me, and I said, “By God, we should drive to the factory and tell them in person.” We are retired now and have an RV.”
― Deb Olin Unferth, Wait Till You See Me Dance

“It's the last sound the hens hear, other than their own voices, as farmhands stuff them at the end of their lay into the carbon dioxide cart (which according to UEP guidelines must cause "rapid loss of consciousness until death," though the guidelines do not specify how long "rapid" is - does not all life hurtle rapidly towards death?).”
― Deb Olin Unferth, Barn 8

“Chickens gossip, summon, play, flirt, teach, warn, mourn, fight, praise, and promise.
It is this last, promise, that concerns us here.”
― Deb Olin Unferth

“Maybe that’s the point: he was just a typical guy in a typical place, and he made choices, and each choice changed him, and each change began to close off other possibilities, seal shut other rooms, exclude other people he might become, one by one, until he could no longer be anything but what he was.”
― Deb Olin Unferth, Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War

“Well, almost isn't enough.
But almost is damn close. Sometimes almost is all you need to go forward.”
― Deb Olin Unferth, Barn 8

“It was already too late. They all knew it. The enemy has clearly won. Soon all that will be left of the miracle of our planet will be the monocrops of damaged cows, pigs, dogs, hens, a few other practical species - and humans, horrible, unbeatable, disgusting humans.”
― Deb Olin Unferth, Barn 8

“You'd think that by now with all the genetic meddling, sensory deprivation, and inbreeding, a hundred and fifty years' worth, that these animals would barely have brains anymore, that their minds' dials would be set on static, a low hum, refrigeration vibration. You'd think they'd be blank-brained, a collection of impulses and flesh. Indeed some of the hens on Happy Green Family Farm were moronic slabs, but most were not. They all contained within them the DNA, if not the full expression, of the original bird intelligence. Those hardy genes pressed themselves into existence in all kinds of ways, so that most of these hens still had that feral smart-bird spark in the eye, the instinctual Gallus need to flock, wander, arrange themselves into hierarchies, mate, rear, befriend, follow, fly their awkward short flights, bathe and preen in the dust.”
― Deb Olin Unferth, Barn 8

“Chickens gossip, summon, play, flirt, teach, warn, mourn, fight, praise, and promise.
It is this last, promise, that concerns us here.”
― Deb Olin Unferth, Barn 8

“Hens. Sweet little puffs. The solid adventure of saving them: Who didn't want to be part of it? Who wouldn't? The time had come to say no more.”
― Deb Olin Unferth, Barn 8

“Far above the shit, in the shifting sky, the stars were the only objects humans could see and not destroy. They could destroy only the sight of them, which they were doing, dot by dot, the stars blinking out over the planet, dimmed by human light.”
― Deb Olin Unferth, Barn 8

“Only three humans ever knew where those forty thousand hens went, and they told no one.”
― Deb Olin Unferth, Barn 8

“Déjà, il était trop tard. Ils ne savaient bien. L'ennemi avait clairement gagné. Bientôt il ne resterait plus du miracle de la vie sur notre planète que la monoculture des vaches, cochons, chiens et poules maltraités, quelques autres espèces utiles -ainsi que des humains, d'horribles, de répugnants, d'imbattables humains.”
― Deb Olin Unferth, Les pondeuses de l'Iowa

“had not lived the life of the girl in New York. She had chosen to go to Iowa,”
― Deb Olin Unferth, Barn 8

“I’m not sure what it was about that first trip to Guatemala that made him want to go back, but he did. That man, that typical drunk gringo in Guatemala, had emerged from the bar, sobering in the light, brushing off his shirt, waving away his comrades, and had taken a new walk—not the one he took with me, that was just more of the same, minus the drinking—but the one after ours, a walk he would never return from, not really, not because he didn’t want to and not because he wasn’t allowed to, but because he couldn’t. A typical man is capable of that.”
― Deb Olin Unferth, Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War

“Si le cerveau des mammifères a évolué selon une certaine voie, celui des oiseaux en a suivi une autre . Progression dynamique plutôt que stagnation reptilienne. Au lieu de se déployer à la surface en gros plis grumeleux comme chez les mammifères, leur intelligence est enfouie dans le cortex. Comment voler avec une grosse tête ? Leur cerveau est compact, renferme plus de neurones dans un petit espace que tout autre animal.”
― Deb Olin Unferth, Les pondeuses de l'Iowa

“I might be all-knowing about these people and animals, but even I do not know what comes after death for chickens.”
― Deb Olin Unferth, Barn 8

“Which of these chickens do humans most resemble: the ones roaming in ovals - a school yard, a campus, a neighborhood? Or the genetically modified monsters - wobbling inside our boxes, clutching our pieces of plastic and metal, mincing and crimping in our shoes, snapping at each other in tight spaces, poking our various machines that swivel or light up or open in simulation of activity, "amusement," "exercise," "work," "love"?”
― Deb Olin Unferth, Barn 8

“Qu'est-ce qu'on a à se laisser écraser par l'ennemi, pendant qu'on se contente de bredouiller poliment qu'on n'est pas d'accord ?”
― Deb Olin Unferth, Les pondeuses de l'Iowa