Maud Casey > Quotes

“I was born with a reading list I will never finish.”
― Maud Casey

“I was born with a reading list I will never finish”
― Maud Casey

“The fury began before she was old enough to give it a name. When she arrived at the hospital, dragged through the door into the red era of soul science, her fury was called hysteria, as if it had nothing to do with her, and she became we. and we became the disease that said we wanted to steal, to falsely accuse, to set things on fire. Fine, let it burn.”
― Maud Casey, City of Incurable Women

“He finally understood...the thing that the people during the Paleolitic Age, freaking 20,000 to 8,000 B.C., were after when they came up with mythologies to do with flight—a desire for the magic of the sky, for something bigger than their feet treading the earth.”
― Maud Casey, Genealogy

“I dare anyone to find me a lovelier day!”
― Maud Casey, The Man Who Walked Away

“Beauty is an answer to anguish...”
― Maud Casey, The Man Who Walked Away

“When they hypnotize us, ammonia becomes rose water, charcoal becomes chocolate, a top hat becomes a baby to be cradled. We drink, we eat, we rock our long-lost babies from the before. Their questions are never to do with the before. What before? What is the question? We are never sure, only that they have one and they have an answer, too. To be hypnotizable is proof of the invisible lesion on our brains and so proof of our hysteria.”
― Maud Casey, City of Incurable Women

“I was born with a reading list, I will never finish”
― Maud Casey

“If mystery, the genre, is about finding the answers, then mystery, that elusive yet essential element of fiction, is about finding the questions.”
― Maud Casey, The Art of Mystery: The Search for Questions

“Isak Dinesen wrote, “There is no mystery in art. Do the things you can see, they will show you what you cannot see.” In other words, there is mystery in art, but one of the ways it is conjured occurs when an author lavishes narrative attention on the visible.”
― Maud Casey, The Art of Mystery: The Search for Questions

“Stories are how we stand in the presence of mystery.”
― Maud Casey, The Art of Mystery: The Search for Questions

“The demand for likability is dangerous. It’s a conversation stopper, and we need conversations, in so-called real life and in fiction.”
― Maud Casey, The Art of Mystery: The Search for Questions

“It’s not incidental that Comyns and Rhys were women writers during the interwar period and just after, when a lot was permitted and a lot was denied for women. No way forward? No way back? Levitate.”
― Maud Casey, The Art of Mystery: The Search for Questions

“I was born with a reading list that never ends.”
― Maud Casey

“...marveling yet again at the way the very same things that cause him to grind his teeth-with a different lens, a tighter focus, better lighting-look like love.”
― Maud Casey, The Man Who Walked Away

“They are all doing their best; even when they are not, they wish they were, and that is worth something too.”
― Maud Casey

“I was born with a book list i will never finish”
― Maud Casey

“I was born with a reading list, I will never finish.”
― Maud Casey

“It's a razor's edge kind of innocence, which relies on a willingness to be duped for the sake of transcending ordinary experience, for the sake of astonishment.”
― Maud Casey