Amina Cain > Quotes

“Still in the process of becoming, the soul makes room.”
― Amina Cain, Indelicacy

“I wanted to sit quietly in front of the window as the cat did. I wanted to show my excitement like the dog.”
― Amina Cain, Indelicacy

“To be in favor of solitude is not to be against community or friendship or love. It’s not that being alone is better, just that without the experience of it we block ourselves from discovering something enormously beneficial, perhaps even vital, to selfhood. Who are you when you are not a friend, a partner, a lover, a sibling, a parent, a child? When no one is with you, what do you do, and do you do it differently than if someone was there? It’s hard to see someone fully when another person is always attached to them. More importantly, it’s hard for us to see our own selves if we’re not ever alone.”
― Amina Cain, A Horse at Night: On Writing

“Yes, you're changing. But the best parts of you are still here.”
― Amina Cain, Indelicacy

“I hated March more than any other month, with its promises of warmth that never came”
― Amina Cain, Indelicacy

“You try to make yourself abnormal on purpose," he said. "You think it makes you better than the other people around you.”
― Amina Cain, Indelicacy

“I, on the other hand, spent those days lost in my reading. I sat in front of the fire sometimes with my husband, and sometimes alone. I forgot where I was, so forceful were the settings and characters in those books I read, so fine and deep. Yet when I came to, it wasn't unpleasant. In fact, it pleased me very much.”
― Amina Cain, Indelicacy

“When I start writing a new story, I often begin with setting. Before plot, before dialogue, before anything else, I begin to see where a story will take place, and then I hear the narrative voice, which means that character is not far behind. Lately I've been thinking a lot about landscape painting and literature, and perhaps as an extension of this I have started to think through this idea of character and landscape as similar things, or at least as intimates, co-dependent.”
― Amina Cain, A Horse at Night: On Writing

“Writing was not the only thing I wanted to do, but the important thing, I thought, was that I wanted to do it more than anything else. I would write for an entire day, then do nothing for days on end. I'd look at my notebook and feel bored. After some time, however, it was my life that was boring, and I missed writing, so I would begin to write again.”
― Amina Cain, Indelicacy

“We were born to die, but death can feel unreal if we’re comforted in the right ways.”
― Amina Cain, Indelicacy

“I wanted to tell her about my writing, but I was afraid she would think I was exaggerating my relationship to it, that I was lying. After all, I wasn't a real writer, yet I wrote every day. Though I hadn't cleaned for a while, to say that I was a maid would probably have been a more accurate way to explain who I was.”
― Amina Cain, Indelicacy

“What makes you do it, then?'
'My soul,' I said boldly. I didn't care how it sounded.”
― Amina Cain, Indelicacy

“Why is empty space a comfort and a relief? It's not because I project myself there; it's because I can't. It shows me my projections, but they haven't left my mind. Empty space remains empty, always. And for a little while a small part of me can be empty too.”
― Amina Cain, Indelicacy

“was true, I was mean sometimes. But I didn’t have it in me to be kind to someone who saw me only in relation to property and propriety.”
― Amina Cain, Indelicacy

“In books I found even more strongly my desire to write, to write back to them and their jagged, perfect words. I found life that ran close to my own”
― Amina Cain, Indelicacy

“This is the place where your life unfolds. You push something back so the other thing can come forward. This thing is anything, or it is nothing, and you see it be nothing.”
― Amina Cain, Creature

“Then I was alone and I didn't like it. Maybe I should be alone always, I thought”
― Amina Cain, Indelicacy

“Occasionally a man would walk by and ask what I was doing. "A menu for a dinner party," I would say. Or, "I am writing down my dreams." When too many men had walked by with this same question, or some version of it, I said, "Your face looks like the butt of a wolf and it's interfering with my concentration." I was a rich woman now; I could say these things.”
― Amina Cain, Indelicacy

“To be in favour of solitude is not to be against community or friendship or love. It's not that being alone is better, just that without the experience of it we block ourselves from discovering something enormously beneficial, perhaps even vital, to selfhood. Who are you when you are not a friend, a partner, a lover, a sibling, a parent, a child? When no one is with you, what do you do, and do you do it differently than if someone was there? It's hard to see someone fully when another person is always attached to them. More importantly, it's hard for us to see our own selves if we're not ever alone.”
― Amina Cain

“I read books now to bring myself to a feeling. When I walk down the street I'm never sure if I interact with others, or if they interact with me”
― Amina Cain, Creature

“Why did I get so dressed up when no one would see me? It is better that way, to give fancy things to my writing amd my own mind, better than wasting them on people I don't like,”
― Amina Cain, Indelicacy

“she began to keep a journal because she saw that life had mystical qualities”
― Amina Cain, A Horse at Night: On Writing

“What do I do when my friendships turn “bad,” I who pride myself on the deep, loving friendships I have? Because this is a continuum we are talking about, maybe it is inevitable that some friends will feel badly toward each other in the end, or become too changed to go on. The distance can’t be crossed anymore; it is too great. And the memory of your former closeness will be comforting, or you will feel grief. Anything is possible. What does it mean to know someone? What does it mean to be close, or to be distant? And is there a part of you that can still be close in the midst of distance?”
― Amina Cain, A Horse at Night: On Writing

“I would listen to a bird cry, or the cat and the dog scratching around. In those moments I felt like a giant ear.”
― Amina Cain, Indelicacy

“I want to leave a chain of images that remain in the reader's mind. I want to write what heightened experience feels like.”
― Amina Cain, A Horse at Night: On Writing

“Forgive me if I had something more about myself since my identity is not very clear, and when I write I am surprised to find that I possess a destiny. Who has not asked himself at some time or another: am I a monster or is this what it means to be a person?”
― Amina Cain, Creature

“Forgive me if I add something more about myself since my identity is not very clear, and when I write I am surprised to find that I possess a destiny. Who has not asked himself at some time or other: am I a monster of is this what it means to be a person?”
― Amina Cain, Creature

“Perhaps solitude is a practice as much as an instinct, its pleasures very much contextual. Sometimes being alone is terrible.”
― Amina Cain, A Horse at Night: On Writing

“Later on we would all be dead, but the cabinet would remain, and the people who used it would be different, though likely related to the ones who had used it before.”
― Amina Cain, Indelicacy

“We all carry our lives in us, not just our problems or nightmares, but something of what we were before.”
― Amina Cain, Indelicacy