Susan Stewart > Quotes

“The voice of a person thinking, discovering, revising, is ever-present without any loss in grace or ease.”
― Susan Stewart

“And it is in this gap between resemblance and identity that nostalgic desire arises. The nostalgic is enamored of distance, not of the referent itself. Nostalgia cannot be sustained without loss.”
― Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection

“And if I'm homesick it's a window
shrouded with ice where a young girl traces a name
on the glass that's beginning to look like my name.
It's the sky taking shape before me in the silence
like a ghost who makes nothing come true.”
― Susan Stewart, Yellow Stars and Ice

“In the Novel

He described her mouth as full of ashes.
So when he kissed her finally
he was thinking about ashes

and the blacker rim just below
the edge of the ashtray,
and the faint dark rim that outlined her lips,

and the lips themselves, at the limit
of another darkness, farther
and far more interior.

Then the way the red,
paling, just outside those lines
caught fire and the pages caught

soon after that. Slowly at first,
but then all at once
at the scalloped brown corners of each;

like the ruff of an offended and darkening bird,
extended, then folded
in on itself; multiple,

stiffening, gone.”
― Susan Stewart, The Hive: Poems

“Someone is always at the door,
no one is ever there.”
― Susan Stewart, Yellow Stars and Ice

“dreaming is incompatible with freedom because
dreaming leaves us with no sphere of action”
― Susan Stewart

“Point of view offers two possibilities: partial and complete.”
― Susan Stewart

“This bourgeois conjunction of sign and signified is apparent in the dramatic rescue of the classics offered in advertisements for gilt-and-leather volumes of “The World’s Greatest Literature.”
― Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection