Dana Spiotta > Quotes

“Do you need an audience to create work, or does not having an audience liberate you and make you a truer artist?”
― Dana Spiotta, Stone Arabia

“The issue isn't, Am I good enough? No. The issue is, Do I not have any other choice? Will and desire don't matter. Ability doesn't matter. Need is the only thing that matters.”
― Dana Spiotta, Stone Arabia

“I wondered if my life was going to be one immersion after another, a great march of shallow, unpopular popular culture infatuations that don't really last and don't really mean anything. Sometimes I even think maybe my deepest obsessions are just random manifestations of my loneliness or isolation. Maybe I infuse ordinary experience with a kind of sacred aura to mitigate the spiritual vapidity of my life....no, it is beautiful to be enraptured. To be enthralled by something, anything. And it isn't random. It speaks to you for a reason. If you wanted to, you could look at it that way, and you might find you aren't wasting your life. You are discovering things about yourself and the world, even if it is just what you find beautiful, right now, this second.”
― Dana Spiotta, Eat the Document

“Incidentally, if you have never stalked someone close to you, I highly recommend it. Check out how it tranforms them. How other they become, and how infinitely necessary and justified the stalking becomes when you realize how little you know about them, how mysterious every aspect of them seems with an at a distance but close examiniation.”
― Dana Spiotta, Eat the Document

“I'm thinking about past events. I'm interested in recall, exact recall, of what was said, who said it and to whom. I want to know the truth, undistorted by time and revision and wishes and regrets.”
― Dana Spiotta

“He pursued a lifetime of abuse that could only come from a warped relationship with the future.”
― Dana Spiotta, Stone Arabia

“That is the thing about films. They don't change. You change. The immutability of the film (or a book or a painting or a piece of music) is something to measure yourself against. That is one of the things a great work of art does. It stays there waiting for you to come back to it, and it shows you who you are now, each time a little different.”
― Dana Spiotta, Innocents and Others

“A lie of invention, a lie about yourself, should not be called a lie. It needs a different word.”
― Dana Spiotta, Innocents and Others

“Have you ever closed your eyes and listened to the sound of your own mother's voice?”
― Dana Spiotta

“Memory all to easily accommodates the corruption of regret.”
― Dana Spiotta, Stone Arabia

“When I turned fifty, I was divorced, my son was grown up, and I realized I still had decades to go. It was the oddest thing—just as the culture began to lose interest in me, just as the world decided I was irrelevant, I began to feel more myself than ever. Louder, smarter, stronger. It felt truly adolescent, like I wanted to take drugs and drive fast and shave my head.”
― Dana Spiotta, Wayward

“And saying yes to this version of her life would mean saying no to another version of her life.”
― Dana Spiotta, Wayward

“I'm turning fifty, and it is just now dawning on me that I have limited time," Nash said. "No kidding. I always felt my life was circumscribed by the finite terms, you know? There is a whole world of things I missed out on and will never experience. Whatever I have done, there is an endless amount I have not done. Do you know what that tells me?"
...
"It tells me it is not meant to be this all-encompassing journey. It is not meant to be catholic or encyclopedic. By now I have carved some grooves in this life. A few. What I need to do is hunker down and make those grooves deep and indelible.”
― Dana Spiotta, Eat the Document

“I used to worry about being more efficient. Now, I think, 'Why? What is velocity, and why is that the ultimate value of everything?' The process is really messy, but it's so fun--and you discover weird things that you can only get from just meandering through stuff.”
― Dana Spiotta

“And disruption is liberating, especially if it is a formal, organized disruption. Mere chaos causes anxiety. Preaching didactically causes boredom. But a formal disruption -

Then it approaches beauty of a kind. Then you begin to really be dangerous.”
― Dana Spiotta, Eat the Document

“Sam knew that after her mother died, the last worries and pains would fall away. Sam would see her mother as not merely her mother, but as a full, perfect human. Sam would apprehend the whole of her mother's life, her girlhood through her old age, the whole of her body, her mind, her heart. Her existence on earth would be clear and perfect. Sam was from her, a part of her, and Sam would feel, in a profound way, that she remained a version of her, a derivative. This soothed Sam, to feel her mother's traces in every molecule, her light in every aspect. Her mother would die, but Sam would still be here. She didn't quite believe it yet, but she knew it just the same.”
― Dana Spiotta, Wayward

“Cleanliness, particularly personal cleanliness, was an assertion against madness. It was a declaration of control.”
― Dana Spiotta, Eat the Document

“In your whole life, only in young childhood, and only if you were very fortunate, could you get a measure of innocence—a time free of knowing what will come, of what must come. Those moments, that simple engagement of only what was wonderful about being alive, that love, really, would be at the center of you forever; deep inside, you would have this tender core that believed everything would be okay.”
― Dana Spiotta, Wayward

“What you don’t get from having a mother versus being a mother is how consuming it was, how profoundly one-sided. The child’s job was to need her mother less and less, a progression toward independence. But the mother’s job was to always help, always be there when needed, and never, ever stop worrying.”
― Dana Spiotta, Wayward

“Always she liked to imagine herself as subtly different from everyone else, enjoying the tension and mystique of being ordinary on the surface but with a radical, original interior life.”
― Dana Spiotta, Wayward

“It interested Carrie, where the film was going, however obvious its point; how enslaved we are by our bodies, our selves concealed. How much are we our bodies? And why is it so different for women? Why is Nicole's tumid, faded person so much less appealing than worn, old Jack? And it isn't just success or money. It is men and women. Carrie felt a heat rise in her face.”
― Dana Spiotta, Innocents and Others

“The repetition of the days did something to you. You knew the monotony, but you couldn't fight it. You had to invent your own repetitions to meet it. A ritual. This early, barely awake kneeling was hers.
She looked deep into the black of her closed eyes. Stared into the dark. When your sense of vision has very little stimulation, it invents images. Sarah doesn't know the name for this is the Prisoner's Cinema. It is a trick of the mind, blindness turned into glorious sight. Isolation turned into hallucination. After enough time, she saw a series of lights. The false images are called phosphenes, which means "show of lights." But all Sarah knew was that it gave her vibrant colors of great depth, and patterns like a mosaic, like a tiled church floor or sometimes like the spiral of a shell. These visions would not absolve her of her time, her duty, and her deeds. Instead these visions took her through the limits of who she was and what she had done, and for this she felt gratitude, and with this, at last, consolation.”
― Dana Spiotta, Innocents and Others

“Only recently did it dawn on me all the things I will never do: I will never have an apartment in Rome. I will never have another lover. I will never radically change my life again.”
― Dana Spiotta, Wayward

“Sam knew that her love for Ally distorted the view of her. Sam was always shocked when the world didn’t fall out at Ally’s feet. Sometimes Sam wondered - if Ally was another person’s daughter, would I even like her? But she couldn’t actually imagine that. It was impossible for her brain to have perspective on her girl; it was like not being able to smell your own breath. The ferocity of Sam‘s attachment was what made Sam feel like herself.

From the moment Ally was born, pushed out of Sam‘s body (nothing could be more common that motherhood and yet nothing about it could ever ever be banal), Ally became Sam’s sun, Sam’s primary concern. She felt a directedness and a purpose and a meaning she had never experienced before. Another way of putting it: it was the least fake feeling she had ever had, the most earnest. Did all mothers feel this way? Did fathers feel this way? No, yes, doesn’t matter. On some level, It was Ally and then there was every other human on the earth.”
― Dana Spiotta, Wayward

“She was not ugly, she was not pretty. But just that old-fashioned word, plain.”
― Dana Spiotta, Eat the Document

“An arm moving, a person kneeling to shoot in a uniform. It wasn’t, of course, re-creating that day in 1970. The “real” feeling came from using film that reminded us of that day. So her reenactments used the materials—the look—of the collective memory.”
― Dana Spiotta, Innocents and Others

“She herself had done little all day; instead she reported from the edge of an unlived life.”
― Dana Spiotta, Wayward

“Why was so much noticed only in the breach, in the loss, by the regret-filled longing for what was left behind?”
― Dana Spiotta, Wayward

“The Mid was the time when all her gestures feltunbearably sad and futile. And when heat suffocated her. Sam pulled at the neck of her T-shirt, pulled it down and away from her chest. Her body knew what was coming. Her heartbeat picked up speed. And then the hot. A sudden interior flame had bloomed in her., Her heart beat so fast she could hear it in her ears.”
― Dana Spiotta, Wayward

“Why was Will able to buy this cherished object, this marker of some long-past connection between two people, in an antiques store? At some point there had to be an ending, a death or a breakup, and it got tossed in a box to be given away or sold.”
― Dana Spiotta, Innocents and Others