Jenny Boully > Quotes

“It was the particular feel of him that made me want to go back: everything that is said is said underneath, where, if it does matter, to acknowledge it is to let on to your embarrassment. That I love you makes me want to run and hide.”
― Jenny Boully, The Body: An Essay

“It is not the story I know or the story you tell me that matters; it is what I already know, what I don't want to hear you say. Let it exist this way, concealed; let me always be embarrassed, knowing that you know that I know but pretend not to know.”
― Jenny Boully, The Body: An Essay

“But in those days, I thought that by believing in magic and miracles, by believing hard enough, harder than anyone on earth, I would be made witness to the sublime. And so, what I was doing on the rooftop was praying. I was praying for the gift of flight, for the black umbrella and the hidden angels to aid me.”
― Jenny Boully, The Body: An Essay

“Let those strikes of lightning come so we will quickly know what leaves us.”
― Jenny Boully, The Body: An Essay

“How is it the seasons change? Do they change so slowly so creepingly because we so rarely break away from whatever it was that we were dreaming to notice? What the season brings us to suffer (because seasons, no matter how lovely, will bring us to suffer) it brings when we are not looking. I know the look of a cracked landscape, winter in black and white, flat and finite with a sunset on the horizon like a red heartbeat suffering there. It will take me longer each morning now to go out and face it, the leaves shivering then falling about as if to remind that somehow despite leavings, there is some magic, some beauty there. I don’t want it: the mountain view, the shimmer of summer rain, a troutfilled creek. How is it that I came to be here this way with the wind a suggestion that it was, indubitably was, autumn (already and again)?”
― Jenny Boully, The Book of Beginnings and Endings

“I suppose we were merely on loan in each other's lives; these last years have already broken their secrets, have already gone out ahead and beyond us, reaching their conclusions: the present was beautiful in my not knowing. There are some sufferings as crimson and fallen, vibrant as autumn's tremblings.”
― Jenny Boully, The Body: An Essay

“The experience of time translates itself into language, and language translates itself into distance, which translates itself into longing, which is the realization of time. (…) how sad and strange that I, Jenny Boully, should be the sign of a signifier or the signifier of a sign, moreover, the sign of a signifier searching for the signifies.”
― Jenny Boully, The Body: An Essay

“That I love you makes me want to run and hide.”
― Jenny Boully, The Book of Beginnings and Endings

“The world then, was nothing more than lost messages, miscommunications--her heart, a daring carrier pigeon forever circling overhead.”
― Jenny Boully, The Book of Beginnings and Endings

“After all, when one goes out into the city with the sole goal of capturing the city, only to discover that the city is nothing but a restless shifting of scaffolding, then one must refrain from going out.”
― Jenny Boully, The Book of Beginnings and Endings

“I only said I loved you in my poetry.”
― Jenny Boully, [one love affair]*

“What image of beauty we hold exists so brilliantly, so beautifully in our minds, and the sad task then is to somehow transcribe this image so that it becomes viewable to others.”
― Jenny Boully, The Book of Beginnings and Endings

“But when do the daydreams begin and the dreams end, and where does the sky end and the prairie grass begin? There are stars in the grass.”
― Jenny Boully, Betwixt-and-Between: Essays on the Writing Life

“In order to be a better writer and better reader, I need to believe in my own death and in the death of others.”
― Jenny Boully, Betwixt-and-Between: Essays on the Writing Life

“What then of all the plot in between I have honestly forgotten? I feel a nausea of panic that I will die soon.”
― Jenny Boully, Betwixt-and-Between: Essays on the Writing Life

“Our drive to keep and preserve seems to have achieved only the obliteration of self and memory.”
― Jenny Boully, Betwixt-and-Between: Essays on the Writing Life

“Can you give to someone else what has been? That's the task of the poet.”
― Jenny Boully, Betwixt-and-Between: Essays on the Writing Life

“With dreaming, we speak differently. We use the past tense. Dreams are about the past, but we want them to be about the present, the future. That is, we will make them mean something.”
― Jenny Boully, The Book of Beginnings and Endings

“The important of the beginning is to make possible the love affair; the importance of the ending is to make impossible the love affair.”
― Jenny Boully, Betwixt-and-Between: Essays on the Writing Life

“It wasn't that the ice-cream man came everyday; he came whenever the child heard his music.”
― Jenny Boully

“Today, I saw a little girl in a little pink dress who couldn't be older than two, and I thought of how nothing could be more fleeting, more precious, more joyous than her not knowing how, running beneath the cherry trees, she was all lightness, all reverie.”
― Jenny Boully