Ariana Reines > Quotes

“I want to say something about bad writing. I'm proud of my bad writing. Everyone is so intelligent lately, and stylish. Fucking great. I am proud of Philip Guston's bad painting, I am proud of Baudelaire's mamma's boy goo goo misery. Sometimes the lurid or shitty means having a heart, which's something you have to try to have. Excellence nowadays is too general and available to be worth prizing: I am interested in people who have to find strange and horrible ways to just get from point a to point b.”
― Ariana Reines

“Maybe what made me cry in class was how tired I was and how sad and hard it is, and how rare, to undertake an act that's truly free, and not just a response to a confused surge of drives and fears.”
― Ariana Reines, Coeur de Lion

“It is not easy to be honest because it is impossible to be complete.”
― Ariana Reines

“Where are the messy women who love the fragile boys.
Where are the suicides who are my heroes.
Where are the bitches who know what they want, who love what they do, bosomy and declarative, happy to be artistic in this stupid night.”
― Ariana Reines, Coeur de Lion

“Shit is disgusting and horrible. A lot of people and things are disgusting and horrible, and I want to be a nice person, and I am. When you are speaking about rejected people whose suffering makes them disgusting, you are speaking about shit. I do not mean that we should all eat shit and love what we can’t help rejecting. I am saying that I tried to do that, just to see if it was possible.

It’s not possible. ”
― Ariana Reines

“It's dangerous to have feelings when you don't have any money.”
― Ariana Reines

“You have got to goad yourself toward a becoming that is in accordance with what you are innate. You have got to sometimes become the medicine you want to take.”
― Ariana Reines, The Cow

“When I feel nothing for a person I get scared I'm losing my humanity and that turning cold means my heart's been botoxed; we're all fucked.”
― Ariana Reines, Coeur de Lion

“I can't wait to never see you again.”
― Ariana Reines

“I was naked except for culture like everybody else in my generation
I come from a broken home like they do and I hide it, acting serene
At the joystick in the command station of my so-called self
Except I try openly to hide only badly whatever it is I think is wild that I’m
Doing my best to reveal by not really hiding, though hiding.”
― Ariana Reines

“Poetry’s not made of words”
― Ariana Reines

“I have to get to the other side of the animal”
― Ariana Reines, The Cow

“I had an idea of symmetry Bordering on theology”
― Ariana Reines, A Sand Book

“Just meat on a stick with the vague sense that somewhere between lavish femininity
And state violence lay a mediocre thing called liberty.
Still, to be able to sleep at all’s a procedure of waking. Everybody
Has to live somewhere being that we are here where most
Of us are not welcome. Did you know transcendental
Homelessness was a thing. But I dreamed this dream
On a physical mattress. On an actual floor in a room with a door
That I pay and pay for. If you write you can forge
A substance that is other than the woman of substance
You are. If you do it to such a point you can find
Yourself declining substance altogether. It happens. It is a danger. But there will
Always be the idea of a bath or a sleep in a bed or a dream
In the head of a woman who is even beautiful visibly
Or at least groomed, or somewhat fresh
Or like that most domestic of bugs the cockroach
Dragging his ponderous suit of armor across the floor
Or clean sheets when it’s raining and I love you so much
And I think Gimme Shelter, which is a movie I’ve never seen.”
― Ariana Reines

“Can a book carry you into the world you have to pretend doesn't exist most of the time, can a book carry you back out into what first made you alive.”
― Ariana Reines, The Cow

“(...)

It's no good knowing something
When all the men for twenty years as God is my witness
Can't walk without one hand on their junk yelling

At me and owning me whenever they say so
Whatever I say I am to myself in their street
Where they are the crowd and the power. Today I look like

I love myself more than you Mister love yourself
For once. I shit on what I cherish
Most as fast as I can so you won't get to it first.”
― Ariana Reines, Mercury

“And your ex, or maybe you're back with her
I don't know, Emma. I read some of what she wrote
To you when I broke into your gmail account.
She's charming. A little shallow maybe”
― Ariana Reines, Coeur de Lion

“MAINTAINING INTACTNESS OF THE SILLY Small cellulite of the upper arms Maintaining intactness of the silly Putty genital I’d rather eat Than fuck I’d rather read than quote Unquote make love, yearning to turn From symmetry my eye wants To goggle. I was looking at his sleeping Countenance, as steadfast as one dead The moon was rotting”
― Ariana Reines, A Sand Book

“Googling Guerlain Baby Glow over my beef Carnitas in Whole Foods a few hours After my miscarriage Prince died”
― Ariana Reines, A Sand Book

“kavanaugh migraine,”
― Ariana Reines, A Sand Book

“English connives I mean contrives many Routes to the unseen”
― Ariana Reines, A Sand Book

“you must stop lying to yourself you must drop the rationalizing or else mercury will stop being your friend. he has every right to fuck with you.”
― Ariana Reines, A Sand Book

“Last night We camped in the rain A psychic shook a bag of cowrie- Studded discs onto a table & told Me I’d get back my lost notebook Mercury is in retrograde and you Are on the road, he said. He looked Like a LARPer”
― Ariana Reines, A Sand Book

“There are nectars hidden
In your body. Suck your own tongue.”
― Ariana Reines, A Sand Book

“LACK OF FAITH You keep saying IS WORSE THAN WANT OF DISCIPLINE.”
― Ariana Reines, A Sand Book