Nell Zink > Quotes

“...the whole universe is contagious if you look at it long enough. Just opening your eyes puts you in front of a mirror, psychologically speaking. Garbage in, garbage out. Or rather, garbage goes in, but you never get rid of it. It just lies there turning to dust and slowly wafting a thin layer of grime on to every other object in your brain. Scraping the gunk off is not only a major challenge, but the chief burden of human existence. that's why I keep things so clean. Otherwise I would see little flecks of [ ] shit everywhere I looked ...”
― Nell Zink

“I felt like the Empress Theodora. Can I get more orifices? I thought. Is that what she meant in the Historia Arcana—not that three isn’t enough, but that the three on offer aren’t enough to sustain a marriage?”
― Nell Zink, The Wallcreeper

“I wanted to hear my own whispers in the next room and know that I was thinking of me.”
― Nell Zink, The Wallcreeper

“Gradually her fear faded to the existential angst that incessantly haunts all mankind in modernity.”
― Nell Zink, Mislaid

“Why shouldn’t loving puppets be a revolutionary act, in a world where so many people love drone warfare?”
― Nell Zink, Nicotine

“She was young the way an actual young person is young.”
― Nell Zink, The Wallcreeper

“Peggy had not forgotten the intellectual and social ambitions she had started life with only a decade before. Years so weary and routine laden, they seemed like a single year that had repeated itself. She wanted to be creative and self-reliant.”
― Nell Zink, Mislaid

“Besides, adulthood is never something girls grow into. It is something they have thrust upon them, menstruation being only the first of many two-edged swords subsumed under the rubric “becoming a woman,” all of them occasions to stay home from school and weep.”
― Nell Zink, Mislaid

“When the past is hard to explain, it’s best to concentrate on the future.”
― Nell Zink, Mislaid

“Fatherhood surprised him pleasantly. As a male he assumed no unpleasant duties would accrue to him. He would be responsible for teaching the child conversational skills once it reached its teens.”
― Nell Zink, Mislaid

“As I was to learn, reproductive urges will serve as an alibi for just about anything.”
― Nell Zink, The Wallcreeper

“And never cry, or say mean things. Insults just aggravate them. If you want to cry, laugh. It sounds the same. They can’t tell the difference.”
― Nell Zink, Mislaid

“Over milk and cookies after Karen’s return, she confessed to Karen that she had no idea what Karen wanted out of life. “You’re a cipher,” she said. “A mystery. What are your ambitions and desires? When I was your age, I wanted to write plays.” “I want to get good grades and go to college.” “And what are you going to do when you get there?” “How would I know? I need to get there first and see what it’s like. There are all these majors that sound neat, but I don’t know what they are. Like ‘sociology.’ What is it?”
― Nell Zink, Mislaid

“College girls on the road! One-night stands! Lee felt like an Austro-Hungarian emperor attended on his deathbed by flappers. He felt them stealing his life—literally going back in time and taking, through their incoherent lifestyles, the little he had struggled so hard to attain.”
― Nell Zink, Mislaid

“People talk a lot about midlife crisis, the momentary stress that arises when you finally slack off. The sublime flash of greenish light as the curtain of the sanctuary rips, when poets start reviewing books and programmers take jobs in quality control.”
― Nell Zink, The Wallcreeper

“She had wanted to write about idealised partners. But the impressive men she had known weren’t anybody’s partner. They were lone wolves and dictatorial heads of families. The idea of partnering with a powerful man – well, it sounds nice enough, but even on paper it won’t fly. A novel ends with a wedding for a reason. Partnership is antidramatic. Partners are not adversaries. Partners don’t fuck.”
― Nell Zink, Mislaid

“He informed Byrdie that his social engineering ambitions betrayed all the delusions of grandeur that you might expect from the son of a poet.”
― Nell Zink, Mislaid

“She had read enough lives of the poetesses to know all about inpatient psychiatric care.”
― Nell Zink, Mislaid

“You're a cis-het dude-bro on strike for better conditions.”
― Nell Zink, Nicotine

“They portrayed the world as in need of repair, not as populated by people you'd be insane not to hate.”
― Nell Zink, Mislaid

“I saw that I had followed the chief guiding principle of the petty bourgeoisie in modernity and made a virtue of necessity in telling myself my husband was a good lover.”
― Nell Zink, The Wallcreeper

“Her social position at Safeway was better than it was at home.”
― Nell Zink, Mislaid

“It’s a digital e-cigarette.” “What’s digital about it?” “You hold it in your fingers, like this.” “I’m serious. Is it part of the Internet of things? Do they know when you’re smoking it?” “I don’t think so. I think they just mean it works on electricity.”
― Nell Zink, Nicotine

“On one occasion when she was feeling edgy and exhausted and her cartilage ached the way it sometimes did, she stopped off at the memorial park on her way home. It was the biggest public open space in the country. She drove up and down the long rows of granite grave markers set flush to the grass singing, “If you are going to San Francisco,” thinking about smothering Byrdie and taking the car and just running away. Her life could start over as it was meant to start – but how was that, pray tell? As a lesbian? What about those two or three months of fixation on sleeping with Lee? Is that what lesbians do? She looked back at Byrdie asleep on the back bench seat and said, “Byrdie boy, I love you so much.”
― Nell Zink, Mislaid

“Lee explained to her that art for art’s sake is an upper-class aesthetic. To create art divorced from any purpose, you can’t be living a life driven by need and desire.”
― Nell Zink, Mislaid

“For jobs and men, it’s a seller’s market. There are no other fish in the sea.”
― Nell Zink, Nicotine

“She simply knew she was about to lose something valuable, and like anybody else, she wanted to take the next logical step to make it her own: She wanted to fuck it.”
― Nell Zink, The Wallcreeper

“If and when family planning is the responsibility of females, males are best kept under lock and key.”
― Nell Zink, Mislaid

“it’s the stories we tell ourselves that cause all the problems. If you look reality straight in the eye, you end up a lot less confused.”
― Nell Zink, Nicotine

“If you have to be bad, be so bad sympathetic hearers just shake their heads and give up. Nobody”
― Nell Zink, Mislaid