Mary Cappello > Quotes

“it me, or do these names seem fabricated? Could you match each of these names with its literary mate or author? Rat Crancer (probably a gumshoe). Powder D. Coulter. Weymouth Crumpler (longtime friend of Little Miss Muffett). Pansy Hines. Donald Dumbleton (wouldn’t you know, he had a timothy-head screwdriver in his esophagus). Alice Dalrymple. Zadie Smallwood. Mrs. L. Stretch. Myrtle Yonders (sister of Thistle Near). Anna Skeen (I think she appears in Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives). Florabelle Sledge (an oxymoronish personage). Sister Mary Octave. Waldo Intermill. Evelyn Marie Loveless. Irma Erben (William Wilson’s cousin and Humbert Humbert’s wife). Linnwood Wheeloff (hadn’t Henry James made a place for him in The Americans?), and the incomparably unbelievable Sister Mary Pica—“pica” being the DSM-IV descriptor for disordered swallowing.”
― Mary Cappello, Swallow: Foreign Bodies, Their Ingestion, Inspiration, and the Curious Doctor Who Extracted Them

“Writing is no more than wending a way in an attempt to restore all of the paths that had been cut-short, headed off at the pass, de-railed, even if worded byways are more dangerous than wooded paths, even if the way of writing is ill-lit, and most of all braced by the uncertainty of solitary passage.”
― Mary Cappello, Buffalo Trace: A Threefold Vibration