Lydia Millet > Quotes

“It is not learning we need at all. Individuals need learning but the culture needs something else, the pulse of light on the sea, the warm urge of huddling together to keep out the cold. We need empathy, we need the eyes that still can weep.”
― Lydia Millet, Oh Pure And Radiant Heart

“The rooms of his apartment were full with the dog home again, convalescing. He was satisfied to know, even when she was out of sight, that somewhere in the apartment she was sleeping or eating or sitting watchfully. It was family, he guessed, more or less. Did most people want a house of living things at night, to know that in the dark around them other warm bodies slept?

Such a house could even be the whole world.”
― Lydia Millet, How the Dead Dream

“It was them and not them, maybe the ones they’d never been. I could almost see those others standing in the garden where the pea plants were, feet planted between the rows. They stood without moving, their faces glowing with some shine a long time gone. A time before I lived. Their arms hung at their sides.

They’d always been there, I thought blearily, and they’d always wanted to be more than they were. They should always be thought of as invalids, I saw. Each person, fully grown, was sick or sad, with problems attached to them like broken limbs. Each one had special needs.

If you could remember that, it made you less angry.

They’d been carried along on their hopes, held up by the chance of a windfall. But instead of a windfall there was only time passing. And all they ever were was themselves.

Still they had wanted to be different. I would assume that from now on, I told myself, wandering back into the barn. What people wanted to be, but never could, traveled along beside them. Company.”
― Lydia Millet, A Children's Bible

“If you could be nothing, you could also be everything. Once my molecules had dispersed, I would be here forever. Free.

Part of the timeless. The sky and the ocean would also be me.

Molecules never die, I thought.”
― Lydia Millet, A Children's Bible

“Molecules never die, I thought. Hadn’t they told us that in chemistry? Hadn’t they said a molecule of Julius Caesar’s dying breath was, statistically speaking, in every breath we took? Same with Lincoln. Or our grandparents. Molecules exchanging and mingling, on and on. Particles that had once been others and now moved through us. “Evie!” said Jack. “Look! I found a sand dollar!” That was the sad thing about my molecules: they wouldn’t remember him.”
― Lydia Millet, A Children's Bible

“Beneath the violet pillar, in the vacuum before the roar of the cloud, there came a soft sound that might have been heard by those who listened closely: the gentle sigh of an idea unbound.”
― Lydia Millet, Oh Pure And Radiant Heart

“At that time in my personal life, I was coming to grips with the end of the world. The familiar world, anyway. Many of us were.

Scientists said it was ending now, philosophers said it had always been ending.

Historians said there’d been dark ages before. It all came out in the wash, because eventually, if you were patient, enlightenment arrived and then a wide array of Apple devices.

Politicians claimed everything would be fine. Adjustments were being made. Much as our human ingenuity had got us into this fine mess, so would it neatly get us out. Maybe more cars would switch to electric.

That was how we could tell it was serious. Because they were obviously lying.”
― Lydia Millet, A Children's Bible

“When we ran, if we chose to, we ran like flashes of silk. We had the vigor of those freshly born. Relatively speaking. And no, we wouldn’t be like this forever. We knew it, on a rational level. But the idea that those garbage-like figures that tottered around the great house were a vision of what lay in store—hell no. Had they had goals once? A simple sense of self-respect? They shamed us. They were a cautionary tale.”
― Lydia Millet, A Children's Bible

“Called by the sirens and followed by an albatross.”
― Lydia Millet, Mermaids in Paradise

“Maybe surrender, when it was called for, was the hard part. Not the fight.”
― Lydia Millet, Dinosaurs

“What was a face on television but a code, and what was the difference between these faces but a realignment of line and color to shift among signals? If he grasped deeply this language of symbols, grasped it beneath the surface, he could course through the currents of authority as they coursed through him like heat or the tremble of cold.”
― Lydia Millet, How the Dead Dream

“Oh how the world reflected you in its unending streams of atoms, churning atoms out of which significance beamed--significance, but not purpose.”
― Lydia Millet, Magnificence

“Inside the castle hovered a shadow version of him, alone, watching this full, well-lit house from the other’s emptiness. Looking through the glass, he was divided in two. He saw himself with the family around him.

Glad of it. Almost proud.

As a parent might be. He was his own parent.

He’d learned to be alone, walking. And it was still good now and then. For thought. For recognition.

But being alone was also a closed loop. A loop with a slipknot, say. The loop could be small or large, but it always returned to itself.

You had to untie the knot, finally. Open the loop and then everything sank in. And everyone.

Then you could see what was true—that separateness had always been the illusion. A simple trick of flesh.

The world was inside you after that. Because, after all, you were made of two people only at the very last instant.

Before that, of a multiplication so large it couldn’t be fathomed. Back and back in time. A tree in a forest of trees, where men grew from apes and birds grew from dinosaurs.

The topmost branches were single cells. And even those cells were “ And even those cells were not the start, for they drew life from the atmosphere.

The air. And the vapor. Suspended.

It was the fear and loneliness that came in waves that often stopped him from remembering the one thing. The one thing and the greatest thing.

Frustrating: he could only ever see it for a second before he lost sight of it again. Released his grip. Let it slip away into the vague background.

But it had to be held close, the tree.

In the dark, when nothing else was sure, the soaring tree sheltered you. Almost the only thing you had to see before you slept.

How you came not from a couple or a few but from infinity.

So you had no beginning. And you would never end.”
― Lydia Millet, Dinosaurs

“So when they bent their elegant necks to nibble the grass, some of us shouted taunts. Sprinted toward them, flailing. Some of us enjoyed seeing them panic. They’d bolt in a high-kicking flight toward the trees, frightened by our power. Some of us cheered as the deer fled. Not me. I kept silent. I was sorry for them. The ticks weren’t their fault. To a deer, people were probably monsters. Certain people, anyway. At times, when a deer saw a man walking in the forest, he might prick up his ears and stand still as a statue. Waiting. Wary. Meaning no harm. What are you? asked his ears. And oh. What am I? Sometimes the answer was, You’re dead. And the deer crumpled to his knees.”
― Lydia Millet, A Children's Bible

“Then there was the gray of human habitation. The blue places were turning brown, the yellow places to dust, the green places to smoke and ashes. Each time one of the animals disappeared--they went by species or sometimes by organizations of species, interconnected--it was as though all mountains were gone, or all lakes. A certain form of the world. But in the gray that metastasized over continents and hemispheres few appeared to be deterred by this extinguishing or even to speak of it, no one outside fringe elements and elite groups, professors and hippies, small populations of little general importance. The quiet mass disappearance, the inversion of the Ark, was passing unnoticed.”
― Lydia Millet, How the Dead Dream

“…suffering can be a work of art. It can be made of buried and rising things, helpless and undiscovered, song of frustrated want, silence after desire. It can be the test of the self falling short, constrained, distorted, disturbed or rebuffed, the vacuum left by longing, call without an answer.”
― Lydia Millet, Oh Pure And Radiant Heart

“We were a roiling mass of opinion, most of it mean. Here we sat at civilization’s technological peak, and what we chose to do on that shining pinnacle was hate each other’s guts.”
― Lydia Millet, Mermaids in Paradise

“It’s a basic test,” said Ted. “Whether you grab your weapons. Because you feel threatened. Or can lay down your arms after someone has injured you. Just put them down and walk forward. Holding up your white flag.”

Surrender, thought Gil.

Maybe it wasn’t the coward’s way after all. Maybe surrender, when it was called for, was the hard part. Not the fight.

But how did you know when it was called for?”
― Lydia Millet, Dinosaurs

“Although she didn't have the plumbing, she deluded herself that she was the modern W.C. (about Margaret Thatcher, M.T.)”
― Lydia Millet, George Bush, Dark Prince of Love

“What place would that be, a whole world without roads? It was a panicking thought. A world without roads! He would go nowhere in such a place. He would be trapped where he was, he would have lived out his life only where he was born.”
― Lydia Millet, How the Dead Dream

“I have always wished the present to resemble memory: because the present can be flat at times, and bald as a road. But memory is never like that. It makes hills of feeling in collapsed hours, a scene of enclosure made all precious by its frame.”
― Lydia Millet, My Happy Life

“As he was leaving it occurred to him that he would not come back, to this zoo or to any of them.

With the elephants more than any of the others, he thought as he left them--as he left behind these great beasts who recognized him when he came, who rumbled and swayed sadly--he could feel them waiting. He had thought at first it was food they were waiting for. Here they were, the last animals, locked up and ogled, who had no chance remaining of not being alone. Here they were, and what he had assumed in his smallness was that they wanted food. It was possible to be fooled by the signs of their animation, in the course of a day. But it was not food that interested them. Food was only a diversion for them, because they had little else.

They were not waiting for food, but they were, in fact, waiting. He had not been wrong about that. It was obvious: all of them waited and they waited, up until their last day and their last night of sleep. They never gave up waiting, because they had nothing else to do. They waited to go back to the bright land; they waited to go home.”
― Lydia Millet, How the Dead Dream

“There was the honour and austerity of money as he walked through art galleries, as he saw around him the collections of oil paintings by dead men, lit so carefully that warmth seemed to emanate from within - and not because their art was loved or understood but because it could be sold and bought for handsome sums.”
― Lydia Millet, How the Dead Dream

“Then he would get into a plane and leave the field wide open; the field was crammed with paralegals, all of them stoutly armed with condoms.”
― Lydia Millet, Ghost Lights

“Beyond aspects of pain that are physical, thought Oppenheimer, sickness or injury or privation, beyond the so-called obvious, suffering can be a work of art. It can be made of buried and rising things, helpless and undiscovered, song of frustrated want, silence after desire. It can be the test of the self falling short, constrained, distorted, disturbed or rebuffed, the vacuum left by longing, call without an answer.”
― Lydia Millet, Oh Pure And Radiant Heart

“At times, when a deer saw a man walking in the forest, he might prick up his ears and stand still as a statue. Waiting. Wary. Meaning no harm.
What are you? asked his ears. And oh. What am I?
Sometimes the answer was, You're dead.
And the deer crumpled to his knees.”
― Lydia Millet, A Children's Bible

“One dog got makeup applied to its face, lipstick and blue eye shadow. It was a white-faced dog, so the makeup showed up well. We liked to have an impact. When we were done, the lipstick went back into some mother's Fendi handbag. We watched her apply it, unaware. That was satisfying.”
― Lydia Millet, A Children's Bible

“But being alone was also a closed loop. A loop with a slipknot, say. The loop could be small or large, but it always returned to itself.
You had to untie the knot, finally. Open the loop and then everything sank in. And everyone.
Then you could see what was true--that separateness had always been the illusion. A simple trick of flesh.”
― Lydia Millet, Dinosaurs

“We have seen these bodies, she would think, and even long after we are gone some particle in the universe will hold a memory of the words we once used to describe their beauty.”
― Lydia Millet

“You don’t see a fish in a chair often.”
― Lydia Millet, Mermaids in Paradise