Bhanu Kapil > Quotes

“It is psychotic to draw a line between two places.

It is psychotic to go.

It is psychotic to look.

Psychotic to live in a different country forever.

Psychotic to lose something forever.

The compelling conviction that something has been lost is psychotic.

Even the aeroplane's dotted line on the monitor as it descends to Heathrow is purely weird ambient energy.

It is psychotic to submit to violence in a time of great violence and yet it is psychotic to leave that home or country, the place where you submitted again and again, forever.

Indeed, it makes the subsequent involuntary arrival a stressor for psychosis.”
― Bhanu Kapil

“All my life, I've been trying to adhere to the surface of your city...”
― Bhanu Kapil, Schizophrene

“Is it a right thing or a mad thing not to re-connect, to avoid reading or writing because of what those will bring?”
― Bhanu Kapil

“Is it a right thing or a mad thing not to want to re-connect, to avoid reading or writing because of what those will bring?”
― Bhanu Kapil

“What will you sacrifice
For rain?”
― Bhanu Kapil, How to Wash a Heart

“And so I left,
Never to return
Intact.
Or to a home
That was intact.”
― Bhanu Kapil, How to Wash a Heart

“A schizophrenic narrative cannot process the dynamic elements of an image, any image, whether pleasant, enriching or already so bad it can't be tendered in the lexicon of poses available to it.”
― Bhanu Kapil, Schizophrene

“I’m learning how to leave the love-bed, the sound of pine-wind rushing up the slope, the sweetness of his sleep-face, against my knee: and coke upstairs, and make a fire, and write.”
― Bhanu Kapil, The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers

“So long ago
That many people who were alive that day,
Flinching from a sudden rain,
No longer walk upon this earth.”
― Bhanu Kapil, How to Wash a Heart

“Turning the corner,
Unsurveilled,
I simulate the movements
Of an ape”
― Bhanu Kapil, How to Wash a Heart

“Sometimes a man says something to a woman, and after that she knows she is incapable of giving birth to something. That would live.”
― Bhanu Kapil, The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers

“Something huge and without music has just happened.”
― Bhanu Kapil, The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers

“Yes, just like everyone else,
I had to deal
With the strong feelings
That moved through my body
Like sheets of rain
Embossed
With navy blue diadems.”
― Bhanu Kapil, How to Wash a Heart

“I remember when I
Was a treasured pet.
With casual greed,
How I licked
The salty cream.”
― Bhanu Kapil, How to Wash a Heart

“How do you live when the link
Between creativity
And survival
Can't easily
Be discerned?”
― Bhanu Kapil, How to Wash a Heart

“the link
Between creativity
And survival”
― Bhanu Kapil, How to Wash a Heart

“I could not bear the facial expressions
Of the people
I was closest to, a source
Of embarrassment.”
― Bhanu Kapil, How to Wash a Heart

“Its inky-early outside and I’m wearing my knitted scarf, like
John Betjeman, poet of the British past.”
― Bhanu Kapil, How to Wash a Heart

“Honey on my right eye. Monarch wing stuck to the lid.”
― Bhanu Kapil, The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers

“Because living with someone who is in pain
Requires you to move in a different way.”
― Bhanu Kapil, How to Wash a Heart

“Charcoal—the very thing Ban is made of—is so messy. I was covered from my brow to my waist like the chimney sweep in the poems of William Blake in every art class of my youth. As a teenager, I used to play truant every Wednesday and catch the train to Pimlico, still in my uniform and with my packed lunch, as if I was going to school. I went to the Tate—every Wednesday—like clockwork—to look—at the illuminated books—of Blake—in a very dark room intended to preserve—the golden ink and peacock green or blue embellishments. The error here is that I chose to write my book in place where these colors and memories are not readily available. There is no bank. Instead, I scream them—I scream the colors each to each—and this is difficult. It is difficult to work in simple, powerful ways with the proxy memories. For weeks at a time, I stopped writing—and when I returned, Ban was gone. She continued on without me, and what I had to do next will make you dislike me even more than you already do. I had to eat was on the floor. I had to make an artifact out of something that had left no artifacts. I had to put the charcoal in my mouth and choke it down.”
― Bhanu Kapil, Ban en Banlieue

“As a child. I lay down on the bed like a sentence not written yet. Out came a pen. Out came paper. I have a memory of the paper slipping under my hips, for example.”
― Bhanu Kapil, Ban en Banlieue