Michael Gira > Quotes

“It was a kind of sado-masochism. I would take the things that were painful to me and elevate them and, through the mantra of music, make them into a release.”
― Michael Gira

“I never could read Foucault. I find philosophy tedious. All of my knowledge comes from reading novels and some history. I read Being and Nothingness and realized that I remembered absolutely nothing when I finished it. I used to go to the library every day and read every day for eight hours. I’d dropped out of high school and had to teach myself. I read Sartre without any background. I just forced myself and I learned nothing.”
― Michael Gira

“When my sister was released from the mental hospital, she came to live with me in the tilting and crumbling one-bedroom house I'd bought with the small amount of money I inherited when our parents died. She arrived one afternoon unannounced in a taxi. She must have known instinctively that I'd take her in. I don't know how or why they released her. Probably due to overcrowding, and they had her scratch her name on a form then pushed her out the door. Or maybe she just slipped away when no one was looking (who'd notice in a place like that?)--she never did tell me and I didn't ask her. I was so happy to have her with me again that the last thing I wanted to do was break the spell by letting reality intrude. Ever since they'd dragged her away weeping with laughter and reaching out for me with our parents' blood still coating her hands with shiny red gloves, I'd felt amputated, like they'd pulled her kicking and screaming and insane out of my guts.”
― Michael Gira, The Consumer

“I like Sade. I’m re-reading Juliette. I skip the philosophy and read the salacious bits. His descriptive imagination is incredible.”
― Michael Gira

“I can’t feel with my fingers. I don’t think with my mind.
It’s just that I’m looking, but don’t see with my eyes.
Now I’m happy to be here, to contain what I’ve lost.
By thinking this thought, two parallels cross.”
― Michael Gira

“The sun filters through the closed curtains like urine.”
― Michael Gira, The Consumer

“At my current station in the life cycle I’m increasingly aware that this (or any) effort might be my last. I believe these songs contain something of that sense of finality and the urgency of countering it… My gratitude for your support in funding the recordings and my outsized appetite for sound knows no bounds. At certain times the urge to just give up has been quite seductive, but I’m reminded that there’s a core group of people that care about the work and receive meaning from it, and that knowledge helps to propel me forward.”
― Michael Gira

“Masturbating, I imagined stabbing each one of them, then fucking the knife holes.”
― Michael Gira, The Consumer

“I watched the blank screen of the television reflect the glow of my cigarette and imagined the hovering red ember was me, and I lived in the arid world of tubes and electronics behind the glass.”
― Michael Gira, The Consumer

“Her tongue was a velvet slug that burrowed into my mouth, then wound down my throat into my intestines , where it prepared the nest where she would grow.”
― Michael Gira, The Consumer

“My mouth is open: The Void.”
― Michael Gira, The Egg: Stories by Michael Gira

“Eyeing the money, the manager drooled shamelessly, like an obsessive masturbator spying a fresh jar of vaseline.”
― Michael Gira, The Consumer

“Through repetition, the infinite cataclysms of my heartbeat are rendered subliminal, but they’re always there. You just have to listen.”
― Michael Gira, The Egg: Stories by Michael Gira

“As the sun traveled behind the ceiling of smoke and tarnished clouds , the shadows projected on the underside became the drugged anthropomorphisms and apparitions of their chemical dreams.”
― Michael Gira, The Consumer

“Dave-ey's ticklish! Scoogoodoodooloo! Dave-ey is tick-ickle-ish!”
― Michael Gira, The Consumer

“HERE I AM SEEN CUTTING OFF MY FINGER — A PART OF ME, A PART OF MY SELF, NO LONGER MINE, NOW YOURS TO CONSUME. AM I LESS MYSELF NOW SOMEHOW? ARE YOU NOW BECOMING ME WHILE YOU EAT ME? AM I NOW BECOMING YOU? WILL I LIVE FOREVER THROUGH YOU? WILL WE THEN INFECT EVERYTHING, INFINITELY? HERE I AM SEEN CUTTING OFF ANOTHER FINGER…WHERE WILL IT END?”
― Michael Gira, The Egg: Stories by Michael Gira

“I felt the light shooting straight through my eyes into my skull unfiltered, causing a tumor to grow in the center of my brain. The tumor was shaped like a rose and its petals were as sharp as razorblades. With each new thought, a petal would spiral away from the body of the flower and slice a passageway through the meat of my brain, slowly boring out large sections of my identity.”
― Michael Gira, The Consumer

“This word has travelled from some dead, utterly black region in space, somehow insinuated its way into her lifeless brain, then suffused my own mind with its poison, leaving me completely enslaved and irrevocably transformed. The word is fuck. My name is FUCK.”
― Michael Gira, The Egg: Stories by Michael Gira

“I’ll cut everything away until eventually I’m reduced to a single sensation, a soundless scream in a muffled void. My scream connotes nothing — not pain, not joy, not loss, not fear, not love, just the raw fact of my existence, eating itself forever…”
― Michael Gira, The Egg: Stories by Michael Gira

“I'm conscious of my flesh being food. I'm aching to be eaten.”
― Michael Gira, The Consumer

“Your self is laid out before you like hacked flecks of bloody spittle on a white page, forming shapes you misinterpret as your being. You’re like a monkey looking into a mirror for the first time. You’re shocked and enthralled with your image. You pull at your distended lips and twist your face in caricature. You hiss and bark like an idiot, then weep with grief. But I am the mirror. If you look closely you’ll note the mirror is empty. Nothing is here in this place, least of all you.”
― Michael Gira, The Egg: Stories by Michael Gira

“As my excitement increases, I ' m fellated with savage but gooey fervor by the President of the United States, whom I casually reprimand for not slaughtering enough Germans in the recent race wars by gouging out his eyes as I ejaculate nitric acid into his belly....”
― Michael Gira, The Consumer

“My cunt smells like death, because it was made to choke cocks.”
― Michael Gira, The Consumer

“Since the evolution of consciousness began this process has been leading to its final conclusion: one mind thinking itself.”
― Michael Gira, The Egg: Stories by Michael Gira

“They're in the room at the end of the hall, feeding on each other, sucking, sweating into each others' mouths, penetrating. They're larvae. They are undulating worms. They're monsters. I'm insane, I'm inverting myself. I'm twisting like mud between my fingers.”
― Michael Gira, The Consumer

“When I'm upstairs safe in my apartment, I squat over my frying pan and release their sperm and my shit. I let it simmer over the fire , mixed with wine. As I eat, I play the scene over again in my mind, ingesting each man, one by one.”
― Michael Gira, The Consumer

“My mind is the thought itself, and the question is the
corrosive acid that has been poured into my skull.”
― Michael Gira, The Egg: Stories by Michael Gira

“Her neck extended high and elegant, like a swan, just like our mother's neck before she cut it open.”
― Michael Gira, The Consumer

“An oiled young stud does sit-ups on his Soloflex machine, eviscerates himself with an impossibly honed and gleaming kitchen knife, flings his dangling intestines over his shoulder like a sashaying transvestite in a mink stole and walks straight into a day school room full of naked shit-smeared children, who devour him in a bloody tornado of razor-sharp teeth.”
― Michael Gira, The Consumer

“At times like this the subject will open its mouth with the intention to scream, to release a mindless shriek that will pierce the armor of the domed sky above and shatter the glass that encases the universe itself, stabbing the heart of God. But no sound will emit. The lungs have collapsed and the tongue is a lifeless carcass in the mouth of the victim.”
― Michael Gira, The Egg: Stories by Michael Gira