Nina MacLaughlin > Quotes

“There's more than two to a story -- the doers, the done-tos, and the ones who interpret who's who.”
― Nina MacLaughlin, Wake, Siren: Ovid Resung

“His eyes they held the most dangerous thing, they held the top of the sins. Indifference. Indifference. A vacancy where human care should be.”
― Nina MacLaughlin, Wake, Siren: Ovid Resung

“June verges. It shifts. And it holds two forces at once: the start of summer, the start of darkening.”
― Nina MacLaughlin, Summer Solstice: An Essay

“It’s an old impulse. To honor the dark with festivals of light, to battle it with same. Days are getting darker as we hurtle into winter, it comes at us faster every year. I am listening to sycamore leaves rustle down the sidewalk in front of my apartment. It’s somewhere in the forties. The wind is strong. Its voice changes this time of year, as though coming from darker lungs, and the leaves are at their loudest, last rattle before long quiet. In his fevered novel Malicroix, Henri Bosco describes this almost-winter moment of the year, “when the world was poised on a pure ridge,” balanced between two seasons, casting “a glance back at the aging autumn, still misty with its wild moods, to contemplate deadly winter from afar.” The misty mood is behind us. We’re looking now at something dark and wilder.”
― Nina MacLaughlin, Winter Solstice: An Essay

“Long light and there’s something in the air. Frog-song and bug-song in the air. Honeysuckle in the air. Dew in the air and beading on the tips of petal tongues.”
― Nina MacLaughlin, Summer Solstice: An Essay

“The water holds all of you”
― Nina MacLaughlin, Wake, Siren: Ovid Resung

“[...]
What happens when the boundaries dissolve? Yout borders mean nothing. What lives at the limits of loss? Of hate? What terrible place is that? Look at me. I have been. I know. Do not come to this place where everything is fanged and singed and whimpering.
[...]
No one deserves de horror that has washed my life. I do not matter. This country does not matter, not to me, not in this hour. Keep indifference out of you. [...]
You will hear my yowls in the night, I who am a dog. When the darkness hoards the day, you will hear my yowls and you will remember this sadness. This sadness without boundary, born from loss, born from the dissolving of all the borerlines that made a world make sense,. My howls, the howls of this dog you see before you, they will penetrate the soft edges of your brain while you sleep, and for a moment, as your dream turns sideways, we will not be separate. We will be as one.”
― Nina MacLaughlin, Wake, Siren: Ovid Resung

“You grow up to believe that if you say, Please pass the salt, a person will reach toward the shaker, grab it in his hand, and move it in your direction. But then one day some of us might learn that it can happen that you can say, Please pass the salt, and a person will jam his hand into the mayonnaise jar and fling a fistful of it at your face. All at once, words don't mean what they're supposed to mean.
I am a girl. My name is Io. I say no thanks, not me, stop please. But all at once, words do not matter. I do not matter.”
― Nina MacLaughlin, Wake, Siren: Ovid Resung

“…it is summer and there is freedom, and time, and luck to be had.”
― Nina MacLaughlin, Summer Solstice: An Essay

“We were so alive together.”
― Nina MacLaughlin, Wake, Siren: Ovid Resung

“Walking paths through woods, forests thick with pine and oak and birch, sunlight specking the path between the lace of needles and leaves, I've come across stone walls through trees, away from the path, miles from the road. There's something haunted in them. Long-gone farmers deposited these rocks here, held them, placed them, and in that effort, in the solid thing that remains, their human presence is felt, and their goneness. These walls service as a chain backwards through time.”
― Nina MacLaughlin, Hammer Head: The Making of a Carpenter

“It is the animal in us that knows the dark - this season stirs that animal in us, and stirs the memories, ones that live in all of us, submerged so deep; of the ancient dark, of a time before gods, before form and words and light. Memories of helplessness. Somewhere, deep in, we remember. The animal in us remembers.”
― Nina MacLaughlin, Winter Solstice: An Essay

“We are all swallowed up each moment into the whole history of new.”
― Nina MacLaughlin, Wake, Siren: Ovid Resung

“It feels like torture because in the back of our brains, what we know is these hours are our only ones. They are finite and will be finished.”
― Nina MacLaughlin, Hammer Head: The Making of a Carpenter

“Translators build the bridges. The chasm between languages is a deep ravine of silence. So what can we do but trust that the translators' bridges are sturdy, will carry the weight of meaning from one side of the ravine to the other? But all these bridges are faulty. Hitches and chinks because one language cannot cross over to another language unaltered and unflawed.”
― Nina MacLaughlin, Wake, Siren: Ovid Resung

“There's such a thing as too much love. It's possible to lose yourself.”
― Nina MacLaughlin, Wake, Siren: Ovid Resung

“For those who prefer the lengthened twilights of summer, the afternoon dark carries with it a sense of gloom, a lethargy, a melancholy, a despair. — Nina MacLaughlin, from “The Dark Feels Different in November” , The Paris Review”
― Nina MacLaughlin

“[...]
What happens when the boundaries dissolve? Your borders mean nothing. What lives at the limits of loss? Of hate? What terrible place is that? Look at me. I have been. I know. Do not come to this place where everything is fanged and singed and whimpering.
[...]
No one deserves de horror that has washed my life. I do not matter. This country does not matter, not to me, not in this hour. Keep indifference out of you. [...]
You will hear my yowls in the night, I who am a dog. When the darkness hoards the day, you will hear my yowls and you will remember this sadness. This sadness without boundary, born from loss, born from the dissolving of all the borerlines that made a world make sense,. My howls, the howls of this dog you see before you, they will penetrate the soft edges of your brain while you sleep, and for a moment, as your dream turns sideways, we will not be separate. We will be as one.”
― Nina MacLaughlin, Wake, Siren: Ovid Resung

“You will die and this is an empty way to spend the days.”
― Nina MacLaughlin, Hammer Head: The Making of a Carpenter

“Not all lives are large. Not all stories are sad.”
― Nina MacLaughlin, Wake, Siren: Ovid Resung

“The act of art is metamorphosis.”
― Nina MacLaughlin, Wake, Siren: Ovid Resung

“Right now, the darkness takes a deep breath in. Hold tight. We're riding the backs of the swans. There's no flying without land, no emptiness without an edge. The boundaries begin to dissolve. And yet:

Here you are.

Here you are, the winter tells us.

An offer and a fact.”
― Nina MacLaughlin, Winter Solstice: An Essay

“When men feel small they are dangerous.”
― Nina MacLaughlin, Wake, Siren: Ovid Resung

“You are never, never too old to be changed by love.”
― Nina MacLaughlin, Wake, Siren: Ovid Resung

“We peer into the abyss, tread into the mystery. It’s a temporary death⁠—an end to the limits of the self⁠—and an emergence from it in the form of rebirth, a waking up.”
― Nina MacLaughlin, Winter Solstice: An Essay

“It's dark in there. How deep in the well will you go?”
― Nina MacLaughlin, Winter Solstice: An Essay