Anne Boyer > Quotes

“Suppose for a moment the claims about pain’s ineffability are historically specific and ideological, that pain is widely declared inarticulate for the reason that we are not supposed to share a language for how we really feel.”
― Anne Boyer, The Undying

“There is a lot of room for a meaning inside a "no" spoken in the tremendous logic of a refused order of the world. Poetry's no can protect a potential yes--or more precisely, poetry's no is the one that can protect the hell yeah, or every hell yeah's variations. In this way, every poem against the police is also and always a guardian of love for the world.”
― Anne Boyer, A Handbook of Disappointed Fate

“The exhausted are the saints of the wasted life, if a saint is a person who is better than others at suffering. What the exhausted suffer better is the way bodies and time are so often at odds with each other in our time of overwhelming and confused chronicity, when each hour is amplified past circadianism, quadrupled in the quarter-hour's agenda, Pomodoro-ed, hacked, FOMO-ed, and productivized. The exhausted are the human evidence of each minute misunderstood to be an empire for finance, of each human body misunderstood to be an instrument that should play a thousand compliant songs at once.”
― Anne Boyer, The Undying

“Disease is never neutral. Treatment never not ideological. Mortality never without its politics.”
― Anne Boyer, The Undying

“If you begin to accept your illness, or even to love it, you worry that you might want to keep it around. You think, when you feel bad, that you will never long for it, but in truth you do, since it provides such clear instruction for existing, brings with it the sharpened optics of life without futurity, the purity of the double vision of any life lived on the line.”
― Anne Boyer, The Undying

“Amnesia is vice-president to pain and the mother of philosophy.”
― Anne Boyer, The Undying

“My work is to inhabit the silences with which I have lived and fill them with myself until they have the sounds of brightest day and loudest thunder.”
― Anne Boyer, The Undying: Pain, vulnerability, mortality, medicine, art, time, dreams, data, exhaustion, cancer, and care

“A person who complains about any aspect of breast cancer treatment in public is often drowned out by a chorus of people, many of whom have never had cancer, accusing her of ingratitude, saying she is lucky, warning her that her bad attitude may kill her, reminding her she could be dead.”
― Anne Boyer, The Undying

“Every person with a body should be given a guide to dying as soon as they are born.”
― Anne Boyer, The Undying

“The object of love is not an object at all, and that you’ve mistaken a person for an object is what’s wrong with love’s distortions. To feel the wretched pain of a love after a love has long ended is not just to feel the pain at losing love but feel pain at the way love turns a person into a possession that can be lost.”
― Anne Boyer, A Handbook of Disappointed Fate

“To be declared with certainty ill while feeling with certainty fine is to fall on the hardness of language without being given even an hour of soft uncertainty in which to steady oneself with preemptive worry, aka now you don’t have a solution to a problem, now you have a specific name for a life breaking in two. Illness that never bothered to announce itself to the senses radiates in screen life, as light is sound and is information encrypted, unencrypted, circulated, analyzed, rated, studied, and sold. In the servers, our health degrades or improves. Once we were sick in our bodies. Now we are sick in a body of light.”
― Anne Boyer, The Undying: A Meditation on Modern Illness

“A newly diagnosed person with access to the Internet is information’s incubant. Data visits like a minor god. Awake, we pass the day staring into the screen’s abyss, feeling the constriction of the quantitative, trying to learn to breathe through the bar graphs, head full of sample sizes and survival curves, eyes dimming, body reverent to math.”
― Anne Boyer, The Undying

“I read later that feeling like you are dead can have its mechanical cause in certain kinds of brain damage, such as the kind I've endured from chemotherapy. I'm a ghost, but my loss of me isn't even metaphysical - it's mechanical. Yet the rational explanation of why I feel dead half the time does little to mediate the irrational horror of existing in a way that I feel I don't exist. Here we are, here I am, alone and myself, half of me falling off, half of us gone, and all of us as ghosts or the undying ones, half of us dead and half of myself nowhere to be remembered or to be found.”
― Anne Boyer, The Undying

“Poetry, which was once itself a searching engine, exists in abundance now, as searchable and as immaterial as any other information. As it always had, poetry experiments in fashionable confusions, excels in the popular substitutive fantasies of its time, mistakes self-expression for sovereignty. But in making the world blurry, distressing, and forgettable, poetry now has near limitless competition.”
― Anne Boyer, A Handbook of Disappointed Fate

“If an animal has previously suffered escapable shock, and then she suffers inescapable shock, she will be happier than if she has previously not suffered escapable shock — for if she hasn’t, she will only know about being shocked inescapably.

But if she has been inescapably shocked before, and she is put in the conditions where she was inescapably shocked before, she will behave as if being shocked, mostly. Her misery doesn’t require acts. Her misery requires conditions.

If an animal is inescapably shocked once, and then the second time she is dragged across the electrified grid to some non-shocking space, she will be happier than if she isn’t dragged across the electrified grid. The next time she is shocked, she will be happier because she will know there is a place that isn’t an electrified grid. She will be happier because rather than just being dragged onto an electrified grid by a human who then hurts her, the human can then drag her off of it.

If an animal is shocked, escapably or inescapably, she will manifest deep reactions of attachment for whoever has shocked her. If she has manifested deep reactions of attachment for whoever has shocked her, she will manifest deeper reactions of attachment for whoever has shocked her and then dragged her off the electrified grid. Perhaps she will develop deep feelings of attachment for electrified grids. Perhaps she will develop deep feelings of attachment for what is not the electrified grid. Perhaps she will develop deep feelings of attachment for dragging. She may also develop deep feelings of attachment for science, laboratories, experimentation, electricity, and informative forms of torture.

If an animal is shocked, she will manufacture an analgesic response. These will be incredible levels of endogenous opioids. This will be better than anything. Then later, there will be no opioids, and she will go back to the human who has shocked her looking for more opioids. She will go to the shocking condition — called “science” — and there in the condition she will flood with endogenous opioids, along with cortisol and other things which feel arousing.

Eventually all arousal will feel like shock. She will not be steady, though, in her self-supply of analgesic. She will not always be able to dwell in science, as much as she now believes she loves it.

That humans are animals means it is possible that the animal model of inescapable shock explains why humans go to movies, lovers stay with those who don’t love them, the poor serve the rich, the soldiers continue to fight, and other confused, arousing things. Also, how is capitalism not an infinite laboratory called “conditions”? And where is the edge of the electrified grid?”
― Anne Boyer, Garments Against Women

“The cancer pavilion is a cruel democracy of appearance: the same bald head, the same devastated complexion, the same steroid-swollen face, the same plastic chemotherapy port visible as a lump under your skin. The old seem infantile, the young act senile, the middle-aged find all that is middle-aged about them disappears.”
― Anne Boyer, The Undying

“As soon as a patient lies down on the exam table, she has laid down her life on a bed of narrowed answers, but the questions are never sufficiently clear.”
― Anne Boyer, The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care

“You will understand, I hope, that because of all of this, every pink ribbon looks like the flag of a conqueror stuck in a woman's grave.”
― Anne Boyer, The Undying

“And after treatment, when my body was wrecked, when my body was like a car with parts that kept falling off, when I failed at, as U.S. disability laws calls it, "basic activities of daily living," I wondered how all those dollars had passed through my body and I was still left in such bad shape. If I calculated the cost of each breath I took after this cancer, I should breathe out stock options. My life was a luxury good, but I was corroded, I was mutilated, I was uncertain. I was not okay.”
― Anne Boyer, The Undying

“It seemed like I was doing something ludicrous, trying to build a permanent work of literature out of broken little whimpering bits about the most ephemeral experiences when I was still mostly broken and half-ephemeral myself.”
― Anne Boyer

“A well person’s astral projection remains mostly atmospheric, but the deeply ill person in pain, in order to escape it, can sprint away from the pain-husk of the failing body and think themselves into a range beyond range. When pain is so vast, it makes it hard to remember history or miles per hour, which should make the sickbed the incubator for almost all genius and nearly most revolution.”
― Anne Boyer, The Undying

“The pantheon of those who won’t is the best church poetry has to offer. It’s a temple perfumed with the incense of sacrificed literary reputation, littered with bankruptcy notices for cynical cultural capital, warmed by the greater fire of the intrinsic, populated by the most famous and the most anon.”
― Anne Boyer, A Handbook of Disappointed Fate

“I didn't die, or at least not of this. When I got past my cancer's immediate threat, my daughter said I had done the impossible and arranged for myself to write inside a living posthumousness. After cancer, my writing felt given its full permission. I lost some neural mitochondria and my looks and many of my memories and a lot of my intelligence and an optimitically estimated five to ten years of life span to the curative forces of medical decimation, and having lost all that, found myself to still be myself, damaged into my own intensified version. It's like the condition of lostness is, when it comes to being a person, what finally makes us real.”
― Anne Boyer, The Undying

“Poetry was the wrong art for people who love justice. It was not like dance music. Painting is the wrong art for people who love justice. It is not like science fiction. Epics are the dance music of the people who love war. Movies are the justice of the people who love war. Information is the poetry of the people who love war.

You should know this: that feed is your poem.”
― Anne Boyer, Garments Against Women

“Clothes are a better place for girls to keep their histories than stories. Stories betray girls by saying what we really were according to the rules of some game we had never agreed to play. Stories are about the painful aporia of having to both appear and exist, the things done to us, what we are trying to cover up by getting dressed. But if we kept our histories in clothes, these were the annals only of our own actualization and no one would put in quotation marks the bad things the world had said our way as we walked by on the streets.”
― Anne Boyer

“La gente que se ha marchado no te verá sufrir o menguar, así que, con sus acciones, te mantienen por siempre tal y como eras en el momento de recibir el diagnóstico. Permaneces vívida e inalterada en sus recuerdos: tu cabello es abundante, tu mente es vivaz y tus largas pestañas caen sobre mejillas sonrosadas. Quienes te han abandonado son la gente que jamás tendrá que verte como otra cosa que no seas tú.”
― Anne Boyer, Desmorir

“Poetry is (…) good at going against, saying whatever is the opposite of something else, providing nonsense for sense and sense despite the world’s alarming nonsense.”
― Anne Boyer, A Handbook of Disappointed Fate

“What these museums and landscapes and other sites and materials must consent to is the possibility of being structured along the lines of cognition that are themselves structured along the lines of language which was at first structured itself along the lines of the material world but having met a point at which the question was slow decay or fast oblivion, chose oblivion and loosed itself into what other possibilities were detached from what could be heard or felt.”
― Anne Boyer, A Handbook of Disappointed Fate

“People with cancer are not put in prisons or mental hospitals or homeless shelters like others who are considered deviant, although there are many sick people in all of those places, too, sick with cancer without a bed to sleep in or throwing up from chemotherapy inside a prison ward. But our hypothetical sick person, if cancer is her one big problem, rotates in and out of clinics and emergency rooms and intensive care, as if she is a car submitted for service that will keep it barely running but always coughing exhaust.”
― Anne Boyer, The Undying

“resulta difícil hacerte cargo de la enfermedad y hacerte cargo de ti misma a la vez.”
― Anne Boyer, Desmorir