Susan Neville > Quotes

“To the one who does the butchering, eating will always be a sacrament. The flesh in the dome of your mouth, your flesh, this fallen world.”
― Susan Neville, The Town of Whispering Dolls: Stories

“And it occurred to me that it had been, all along, about copies, nothing else. All of it, this entire flaming universe was about copying itself before it died, that’s all it was. And we were there in the middle of it, as blind to the machinery inside of us as we were deaf to the machinery of galaxies swirling in circles above us.”
― Susan Neville, The Town of Whispering Dolls: Stories

“For the Gnostics and for the fiction writer evil is the source of all moral understanding; the function of evil, in the best of conditions, is tension and imbalance, the eventual creation, through suffering and misfortune, of wisdom.”
― Susan Neville

“The "knowledge of good and evil," Martin Buber writes, "means an adequate awareness of the opposites latent in creation," the yes and the no. He said that the cause of all moral evil is the lie, the particularly human evil that creates illusion -- inauthenticity is Sartre's word -- in the liar and in those around him. We create illusion because we choose to maintain order. Often we create illusion because we need, as did Dr. Jekyll, at least the appearance of goodness. Over and over in the literature of evil the word illusion appears, not because it is an evil in itself but because it is the petri dish that allows evil to mutate and to grow. It was "illusion that ruled," Eli Wiesel says in his great Holocaust memoir, Night, "not the Germans.”
― Susan Neville

“Despite our best efforts, you came to the game at different times and as you know for different reasons. All the reasons go back to the fact that the game board has drastically changed. Know that it always does, though. War, drought, famine, illness, death, poverty. The game board changes underneath your feet. We did not want you to feel the pain of this.”
― Susan Neville, The Town of Whispering Dolls: Stories

“.. almost every face and every voice and scrap of language in this world rises up through a screen or wire like something coming to the surface from the bottom of a lake, or on the other side of some mirrored glass where you can’t quite touch it.”
― Susan Neville, The Town of Whispering Dolls: Stories

“And they are lovely, the turbines, better than power lines, particularly when the sky is blue. Sometimes I do stare at them. The blades look like ballerina’s legs, but all calves and no feet, like ballerina’s legs but with the feet chopped off at the ankle, like a German fairy tale.”
― Susan Neville, The Town of Whispering Dolls: Stories