Christy Brown > Quotes

“You touched my flawed life so gently with love
burning upward in dark steady flame
burning me, burning me into healing.”
― Christy Brown, Of Snails and Skylarks

“I came to you tardy and late
as I usually do to the better things in my life”
― Christy Brown, Of Snails and Skylarks

“Girl in the wind
blowing wide open
the closed doors of my life -
which way are we going?

Standing against the lurid sky
on the stark brink of ocean
arms outstretched
as if your love and hunger
would embrace the world
and I in my inner room
playing my poetic premutations
can only look and ask the unanswerable.

Brave and cunning I speak to my typewriter
knowing it will not answer back
knowing it will not reply
what I ask and do not want to hear
as you with the vast sunset merge
a multitude of dreams away
uniquely alone and outside of me
in the purity and rarity of this moment
immeasurably beyond my love and my rage

and with the dying call of gulls
the echo resounds:

Girl in the wind
throwing aside
the tight shutters of my life -
which way are we going?”
― Christy Brown, Of Snails and Skylarks

“was too young to know if my heart misbehaved itself in any way,”
― Christy Brown, My Left Foot

“Ah dearest heart if you will but wait
I'll become the ideal soulmate
nevermore causing you a moment's trouble
and I but a mere ectoplasmic bubble
swaying above your gorgeous head
gruff and garrulous and safely dead.”
― Christy Brown, Of Snails and Skylarks

“Shall the dire day break when life
finds us merely husband and wife
with passion not so much denied
as neatly laundered and put aside
and the old joyous insistence
trimmed to placid coexistence?

Shall we sometime arise from bed
with not a carnal thought in our head
look at each other without surprise
out of wide awake uncandid eyes
touch and know no immediate urge
where all mysteries converge?

Speak for the sake of something to say
and now and then put on a display
of elaborate mimicry of the past to prove
that ritual reigns where once ruled love
and calmly observe those bleak rites
that once made splendour of our nights?

Dear, when we stop being outrageous
and no longer find contagious
the innumerable ecstasies we find
in rise of hand or leap of mind -
not now or then, love, need we fear thus;
those two sad people will not be us.”
― Christy Brown, Of Snails and Skylarks

“If I could never really be like other people, then at least I would be like myself and make the best of it.”
― Christy Brown, My Left Foot

“Writing may be immortal, but it does not bridge the gap between two human beings as the voice may, and oh, I would rather have an hour's fierce argument with a pal or a few moments of soft chatter with a girl than write the greatest book on earth”
― Christy Brown, My Left Foot

“Daha önce pek fazla okumuyordum. Kitaplar evimizde pek sık görülmezdi. Ekmeğin daha önemli olduğu düşünülürdü. Karnımızı doyurmak zihinlerimizi doğurmaktan daha önemli bir işti.”
― Christy Brown, My Left Foot

“I wanted desperately to say something, not merely to my family, not merely to my friends, but rather to everyone, to the world as a whole. There was something in me, some inner urge to speak, and I wanted to get it out of me, to communicate it to others and make them understand it. I felt I had found something, something I had been looking for ever since I began to think and feel about myself. It had taken years to find, but now I was positive that I had discovered it at last, and suddenly I wanted to fling it to the four winds and let it go round the world, bearing its message into everyone’s heart.

It wasn’t just something about myself, but about all who had a life similar to my own, a life bounded and shut in on all sides by the high walls of a narrow, suppressed life. I felt that I had at last found a way of scaling those walls and breaking loose from the shadow of them, a way of taking my place in the sun and of playing my part in the world along with the able-bodied.”
― Christy Brown, My Left Foot