Darcey Steinke > Quotes

“The problem with being a modern woman, I thought, as the front door swung wide, is that you have to pretend to be stronger than you are.”
― Darcey Steinke, Suicide Blonde

“You’ll see, there are a million ways to kill off the soft parts of yourself.”
― Darcey Steinke, Suicide Blonde

“When you love a woman, you love yourself, and it's terrible really, how it seems perfectly possible to swallow the other. With a man you want to join, you want your ribs to connect like handcuffs. But with a woman if you swallow, she becomes you.”
― Darcey Steinke, Suicide Blonde

“Everything was new, now I’m a junkie, I seem to need more severe doses of experience to feel anything.”
― Darcey Steinke, Suicide Blonde

“Relationships are like wall paper patterns, you think your moving forward but your always caught in your own obsessions.”
― Darcey Steinke, Suicide Blonde

“What is love but a nostalgia for someones history? Their boyhood haunts and sullen adolescence, their teenage trips cross-country and fights with their fathers and especially their old lovers?”
― Darcey Steinke, Suicide Blonde

“I thought of happy endings, how novelists usually flinched. To admit your characters are doomed means you are too.”
― Darcey Steinke, Suicide Blonde

“I know the girl is right because the snake is in me, knotted around my intestines, hanging off my ribs, snuggled like a lover around my black heart. "I love you," I said, addressing the snake, Madison, Bell, Kevin, Pig, my mother, my past lives and the new lover speeding toward me at this very moment. I wondered if it mattered whether you loved one person or another. Weren't lovers interchangeable when you thought back about them? Maybe that was true in the future too. What I really loved was the note. I always loved odd things: the blue curacao bottle, the wet asphalt, my own insipid fear.”
― Darcey Steinke, Suicide Blonde

“The story of Adam and Eve has less to do with evil than the cosmic human sadness that relationships are never straightforward, never pure enough.”
― Darcey Steinke, Suicide Blonde

“For awhile, staring at my paper bag of clothes, my freaked-out eyes in the mirror behind the bar, I convinced myself I would go back to Bell. He was the only man that ever made me feel in life instead of just a spectator, and if he did that by fear and pain, it was still better then when I looked numbly at some man on the couch thinking, I will leave you soon.”
― Darcey Steinke, Suicide Blonde

“I knew people want most what they pretend to hate, that it takes courage to say what you really want.”
― Darcey Steinke, Suicide Blonde

“Nature is most beautiful in its movement: wind, water, the sinking sun.”
― Darcey Steinke, Suicide Blonde

“Sex is a kind of alchemy. It's the one thing other than death that if used properly can change everything, like that first night with Madison, it's all in my head like a beautiful dream. I remember her skin. Its texture made me believe I'd never die.”
― Darcey Steinke

“blue and cold as winter stones”
― Darcey Steinke, Up Through the Water

“Say no! I thought. Say you want yourself all for your own self. Say that you have no specific country, say that you are important without any story from above, say that your home is with me and the other girls up in the sky.”
― Darcey Steinke, Sister Golden Hair

“the outer banks swing out from the coast of North Carolina like the bony curve of a woman's hip”
― Darcey Steinke, Up Through the Water

“birdish cottages on stilts”
― Darcey Steinke, Up Through the Water

“Save me Jesus. Save me Lord. She smiled at the spiders dangling like acrobats above her head, listened to the mouse's minuscule feet gallop against the far wall. The bear wore a velvet top hat and his emerald ring. He said reading the letter put him in the mood to recite a little poem he'd composed all by himself. Never eat porridge from an ivory spoon. Don't drink all the sumac wine or you'll die too soon. Kneel down by the tiger lilies on hot summer days. Don't ever bother reading those boring Shakespeare plays. Sandy heard the troll lock the basement door. She blew her own warm breath down between her breasts in an effort to heat up her heart. A teaspoon of light glinted on the shovel lying against the far wall. She was a little monkey. She was a little bird.”
― Darcey Steinke, Jesus Saves

“When I walked behind her I wanted to place my finger on her delicate collarbone. I wanted to ingest her like one of my father’s communion wafers and let her instruct me, like Jesus, from the inside.”
― Darcey Steinke, Sister Golden Hair: A Novel

“In my room, I stuck my transistor radio between my mattress and pillow. I’d learned I could still hear the music, which came up through the feathers, traveled mysterious as smoke into my ear canal and spread like dark glitter inside my brain.”
― Darcey Steinke, Sister Golden Hair: A Novel

“Across a mangy field was a farmhouse that had wandered out of an earlier time period, gotten lost, and was now unable to find its way back. Fireflies floated over the field and above the farmhouse. Tiered up the side of the mountain were brick ranch houses, lit in two colors: incandescent gold if the families inside were having dinner, or indigo blue if they were watching television.”
― Darcey Steinke, Sister Golden Hair: A Novel

“Lila got out of the car. Her hood blew back from her jacket and she held her hands up to the gulls. He watched the many wing tips brush her, knowing they must feel like breath. In this way she was like his mother. They were more alive than most people, and this gave them power to draw things to them. For a moment it seemed the birds would lift her above the ferry. He rested his eyes. And when he opened them, the birds were gone and she was making her way through the pressing wind back to him.”
― Darcey Steinke, Up Through the Water

“So Mulhoffer was mad?” Ginger asked, as she stood in her father's office in front of his huge mahogany desk. “Yes,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “He believes if you dress like a moral man, then you'll act like one.” “Who died and made him God?” Ginger threw herself into one of the leather wingbacks, draped her legs over the arm. Her father leaned back in his chair. “Mulhoffer went to the Wednesday night Deerpath Creek service and came back with raves. He says they make Christianity fun, like going to a Broadway show or a sporting event.” “What do you think?” Ginger asked. “I've been out there. The head minister wore red suspenders and a blue striped shirt, like a Wall Street banker. They're using corporate philosophies to make everybody feel like they're moving up the church ladder, getting a raise or a promotion. But spiritual change is more subtle than that; you can't just check items off a list.” “Why'd you become a minister anyway?” “For the free wine,” her father smiled wearily, “and all those delicious tuna casseroles and Jell-O salads.” She laughed, but no matter how cavalier he acted, she knew he was worried, because the crease marks in his brow had grown deeper and that shell-shocked look never left his face. “The problem is,” he said, “is that Grace is impossible to explain.”
― Darcey Steinke, Jesus Saves

“He’d seen orderlies roll Carlos off on a gurney after he died, and he’d picked up his ashes at the crematorium. But he couldn’t really believe Carlos was dead. His soul had flown to God but his physical qualities had been infused into everything, one man’s long eyelashes, another’s chaotic hand movements. Once Walter saw a pigeon cock his head in a gesture reminiscent of Carlos and, another time, saw a branch shift in the wind, the same way that Carlos, when surprised, swayed back on his heels. Carlos commingled with everything. Walter sensed his presence but could not touch him, and this made Walter lonely and morose.”
― Darcey Steinke, Milk: A Novel

“I reached my hand under the pillow, turned the dial, and the sound—static mostly—came back up. At first I was worried it was Gregg Allman. But as the static cleared I heard Elton. I loved Elton. He was like Bowie, if Bowie were less fantastic and a whole lot chubbier. You couldn’t worship Elton like you could Bowie, but what he lacked in star power he made up for in desperation. His voice soared up into my brain; he was talking about the princess perched in her electric chair and how sugar bear had saved his life.”
― Darcey Steinke, Sister Golden Hair: A Novel

“He imagined Mary and he curled together on the futon. The scent of her skin like vanilla yogurt. The things she loved, his monk’s fringe, his barrel chest, the feminine way he moved his hands, were all things he found humiliating, but she loved them—he kept having to remind himself of that. Mac would argue that he was filled with manic passion. He was, as Mac loved to say, out of spiritual whack. Mac would try to convince him that heaviness was not real presence. But Mac was wrong. A weightless soul was worthless.”
― Darcey Steinke, Milk: A Novel

“Do you ever pray to Jesus?” Sheila’s mom asked. Here we go. “No,” I said. Actually I did pray. Sometimes I prayed to the memory of the altar at our old church. Not on Sunday mornings but in the evenings, remembering the times after dinner that I’d snuck over to run around on the dark altar, with its linen cloth muddled in gold light. On the altar I’d seen a lady in her coffin, the skin of her face slack and her features completely still, and also a bride so pregnant that the zipper on the back of her dress had to be safety-pinned. I believed that the altar was a soft spot, an opening between our world and the infinite one. Now, though, God was mundane, something old and pretty, but broken, like the bronze door handle, or the odd crystal from a chandelier, things you might see in a box at a junk shop. At times I still felt the open God feeling, not so much in objects but in the space around them, like in the space around the couch or the area between the lamp and my bed: it was in that vacuum that something might happen, though it was impossible to know how to pray to nothingness and if it was crazy to do so.”
― Darcey Steinke, Sister Golden Hair: A Novel

“Ursula K. Le Guin, the speculative fiction writer, acknowledged that anger was useful in resistance to injustice, but she warned that it’s “a tool useful only in combat and self-defense.” Le Guin went on to critique the anger used in second-wave feminism: “If feminism was the baby, she’s now grown past the stage where her only way to get attention to her needs and wrongs was anger, tantrums, acting out, kicking ass.” Only if laws again oppress us do we have the right to access anger. “We’re not at that point yet, and I hope nothing we do now brings us closer to it.” Dear Ursula: We are at that point. And we have been at that point all along.”
― Darcey Steinke, Flash Count Diary: Menopause and the Vindication of Natural Life

“Walter kneeled down and pulled out the enamel canister. The lid stuck at first, but by using the file on his nail clipper, he levered the top off, and there, in a plastic bag tied with a twisty, was what remained of Carlos. He looked at the white ash and bits of gray bone matter. That people you loved died was unacceptable. Also that people you fucked wanted you to vanish was unacceptable. But really it was mostly that people you loved died—this was completely unacceptable. He sat the canister on the nightstand and lit a cigarette, blew out a tendril of smoke. Carlos had been explicit about his ashes; he wanted them scattered down by Bargemusic. Walter had been putting it off, but as soon as it got light he decided to walk down to the bridge. He thought of the ashes floating down into the East River, the fine gray dust burnt clean and pure.”
― Darcey Steinke, Milk: A Novel

“My life fans out like a string of paper dolls. I am malleable, chameleonlike. Each life eats the last until I'm a Russian doll, containing ten women of decreasing size. Across the desert, the midlands, creeping back into the South. To Virginia where you can feel the water in the pages of a book and the light rain makes the leaves tender as skin. I will plant a rose garden and I will wait in that garden for the flick of the snake's tongue that will change me again.”
― Darcey Steinke, Suicide Blonde