Megan Harlan > Quotes

“A city is a place where interesting always beats beautiful.”
― Megan Harlan, Mobile Home: A Memoir in Essays

“At a certain point I need to go wandering. My feet need to hit earth, again and again, that bone-filling drumbeat. I need the sky's colored threads to tangle inside me, pull me somewhere new.”
― Megan Harlan, Mobile Home: A Memoir in Essays

“I need the sky's colored threads to tangle inside me, pull me somewhere new.”
― Megan Harlan, Mobile Home: A Memoir in Essays

“Sometimes a house wants to be your mother. Sometimes a house wants to hide the evidence. Some houses would smother you with good tastefulness, a claustrophobic need to impress. Some houses would like you to calm down already. Some houses want you to get the hell out. Some houses get silly with nostalgia. Some houses are destined for the aftermaths of true love. Some houses couldn’t care less: you might as well be living in generic anywhere. But no one ever is.”
― Megan Harlan, Mobile Home: A Memoir in Essays

“Books mimic adrenaline to the narratively restless: nests of worlds in which the mind takes predestined flights from time and place.”
― Megan Harlan, Mobile Home: A Memoir in Essays

“Farsickness
rough translation of fernweh (Ger):
the opposite of homesickness.

Imagine a love turned out
as bread best cast

to the rivers, feedings
for smaller, far-flung things—

fire-flights of stillness,
forms alighting, then airborne,

until the breeze begins
to feel like hunger,

the wayward sweep of desire—
for the holy wheel

rotating foot, breath, and earth,
the pilgrim's chaff,

frayed and heliocentric,
in need of distance

as a horizon of prayer
to both call and receive.”
― Megan Harlan, Mapmaking: poems