Bianca Stone > Quotes

“I seek forever the right way to know this.
That there are bridges
not built in me.”
― Bianca Stone, Someone Else's Wedding Vows

“Don't tell me that definition of madness,
doing the same thing over again etcetera.
The definition of madness
is a certain enthusiasm, then there has
to be another person there
to not share it in--who is oppressed by it
who can only stare into it.”
― Bianca Stone, Someone Else's Wedding Vows

“Our lives are a series of debts and payoffs that feel barely tolerable. And anyway whenever I walk across the sky to stand in line for the bathroom I think, finally, I am just like a ghost walking over the world trying to distract myself from boredom and hysteria. It’s a kind of holy moment that unfills anger. ”
― Bianca Stone, The Mobius Strip Club of Grief

“The world begins as a wolf tied to a flower. Can you see how it happens like that? Something too violent is attached to something too living?”
― Bianca Stone, The Mobius Strip Club of Grief

“Every daughter
has a cage around her head
and a mother on the cross.
I always hope to take it off, and rarely do.
Instead, I climb up, like a child into the bed.
I nail myself beside you.”
― Bianca Stone, What Is Otherwise Infinite: Poems

“I replay on a loop my one stoic consistency,
my middle-of-the-night vow
that I will start tomorrow
the essential dismantling
of how I live.”
― Bianca Stone, What Is Otherwise Infinite: Poems

“Inspire, but do not write,” said Lebrun to women, hoping that women would not notice that we were already built to write; born, ourselves, a loaded gun, ready to produce language and meaning and sense.”
― Bianca Stone, The Mobius Strip Club of Grief

“I can see the hoary clusters of stars.
I am not absent from bone fossils
and infinity.
Resolve is a machine of cold air.”
― Bianca Stone, What Is Otherwise Infinite: Poems

“I froze under her
dispassionate
infant stare

her twin black crystal balls
focusing fully on me
surveying like
an ancient god
the status
of evolution's
latest results,
making what
could only be
her
Edenic judgements.”
― Bianca Stone

“When I sit down to write I feel unfaithful, to someone, to something. Why should I do one thing over another? Like when pulling a wildflower out of a patch of flowers, my flesh cannot determine, anymore, why this and not that. I burn everything down so it might grow back.”
― Bianca Stone, The Mobius Strip Club of Grief

“Some nights she comes to act as courier, midwife to our own skills. Emily, come like a UFO to implant her genius in us. Our Queen Mab, condemned to be the only woman mentioned in the lyric omnibuses of her epoch; easy scapegoat of men’s centuries, she stood in for all women. So now, of course, she comes to blow off steam in the privacy of the green room. All those living years she walked from yard to yard, gardens flourished in opium poppies; went out at night to see the owls and wed her genius. She applied her passion like a hot iron sword. And no one can take off her clothes, ever—she comes and her language takes them off of us, not piece by piece, not fumbling buttons, but all at once in a single shot, her tiny poems like grenades that fit in the hand. And we here bask in the debris, stripped down to our private parts, the snow white of the bone, the authentic corpse in heat. The absolute original.”
― Bianca Stone, The Mobius Strip Club of Grief

“I sit in the lobby of someone else’s potential
thinking it is my own. I go about my day
convinced I am immortal.”
― Bianca Stone, What Is Otherwise Infinite: Poems

“In general, I am the life of the party. And it’s always the eve of battle. In general, I am hard and quiet. Like a floorboard from a tree long gone. Like a floorboard sanded down, shellacked, hammered in a house no one lives in anymore.”
― Bianca Stone, The Mobius Strip Club of Grief

“Of my unclear and unimaginable self
I want none of it.”
― Bianca Stone, What Is Otherwise Infinite: Poems