James Hynes > Quotes

“A Michigander can be every bit as prickly as a New Yorker, just not out loud. The Midwesterner’s credo: keep it to yourself.”
― James Hynes, Next

“But once violence has been expended and empire has taken some person, place, or thing as its own, it gives that person, place, or thing a new name and erases the old one. This new name also erases the history of that person, place, or thing, as if everything that came before never happened.”
― James Hynes, Sparrow

“Perhaps what Aristotle and Seneca were saying boils down to the same infinite regress, a pair of facing mirrors in which my own image recedes into the distance, until I dissolve in the darkness: I do what I'm told because I'm a slave, and I'm a slave because I do what I'm told.”
― James Hynes, Sparrow

“A slave digs his own pit and stands in it, peering over the edge at everyone else's feet and counting himself lucky whenever they don't step on him.
That's what Aristotle thought, anyway.”
― James Hynes, Sparrow

“Indeed, it was not unusual for the dais to be littered with panties and boxer shorts after one of Branwell's talks at the MLA.”
― James Hynes, The Lecturer's Tale

“Plotting is an organic, and wildly inefficient process of trial and error.”
― James Hynes, Writing Great Fiction: Storytelling Tips and Techniques

“A spark embedded in a body meant for the use of others, shining for no one in the dark.”
― James Hynes, Sparrow

“... the Romans created a wasteland and called it a peace. The entire empire is a mosaic of rape and murder and bastardy and forced labour, of which I am only one insignificant, dull-coloured fragment, off to the side, at the very edge. Insignificant, perhaps, but also representative. I, too, am a product of rape, murder, bastardy, and forced labour. I am the empire in a nutshell.”
― James Hynes, Sparrow

“If Christians are always fighting each other,' I say, 'why do they always say, “Peace be with you”?”
― James Hynes, Sparrow

“The only distinguishing characteristic of a literature professor at the millennium was that he or she wrote about other people's writing. Apart from that, the writing he wrote about didn't even need to be literature, or writing about literature, or even writing about writing about literature. He needed theory...In the unflickering glare, at the center of a severe perspective, Nelson suddenly felt the visceral truth of the world as text; he apperceived the fundamentally linguistic nature of reality. Everything was text, at every level of existence, all the way up from quarks to queer theory. Words arranged in lines; lines arrayed on pages; pages pressed together, bound, and trimmed in books; books arranged cover to cover along a shelf like the words in a line of text; shelves stacked one atop the other like lines of text on a page; rows of shelves pressed together, with just the barest passage for the reader, like the pages of a book.”
― James Hynes, The Lecturer's Tale

“An advertising man understands even more viscerally than an academic that the world is made of discourse, Pescecane argued; he understands in his bones that true power resides in the infinite manipulability of signs.”
― James Hynes, The Lecturer's Tale

“Then Sparrow can't rise any more. The string pulls tight, his wings flail and lose their lift, and he plummets, spiralling back down the way he came, past the moon, through the stars. [] Something's reeling him in, and he's falling, falling, falling [] straight back into the bruised and tender flesh of the boy, alone on the bed.”
― James Hynes, Sparrow

“She plucks out three of them and hands them to Focaria, who grasps them in a pair of tongs, turns to the stove, and dips them into the pot of boiling water.”
― James Hynes, Sparrow

“Maybe Sparrow can't walk as far as Chicken, but he can walk well enough to fill his belly. And maybe he can't fly as quickly as Swift, but he can fly fast enough to escape the fox and keep from being enslaved by man.
Remember Sparrow. He's not excellent at anything, but just good enough at everything.”
― James Hynes, Sparrow

“I am just another author no one will remember, and this is just another book that changes nothing.”
― James Hynes, Sparrow

“... if he climbs just a little higher, he can escape, he can sail away and never come back. He can be Sparrow for ever. But of course, he's forgotten about the string, the one they tied around his leg. He's pulled it as taut as he can, higher and higher, further and further away from the city below, but he can never pull it far enough. He can never pull it until it breaks.”
― James Hynes, Sparrow

“The truth is, I will never know, and neither will you. No touching final reunion will ever be performed in this play. Nothing will be revealed or redeemed or healed. The story will simply stop.”
― James Hynes, Sparrow

“Instead, I have the freedom of the unremarkable, the powerless, and the insignificant.”
― James Hynes, Sparrow

“A broken tool myself, I live in a house full of unread books and broken tools, the irreparable detritus of a dead empire. I am the last Roman, the emperor of junk.”
― James Hynes, Sparrow

“And to hear Euterpe tell it, most of the world was full of Monsters.
And in my imagination, I associated most of these monsters with men.”
― James Hynes, Sparrow

“He said that all bad men are slaves, whatever their station in life, and that only the wise man is free, no matter how lowborn he is. But then he said that the vast majority of men are bad and only very few are wise, and so, worse luck, we're all slaves really, when you think about it.”
― James Hynes

“And there, for the first time, in the beating silence of the air, during an endless moment that lasts for ever and no time at all, I finally become my secret name, my true name. I become Sparrow.”
― James Hynes, Sparrow

“This is the greatest mystery of all: even a bird can be a slave, but even in its cage, it sings.”
― James Hynes, Sparrow

“The truth is, I will never know, and neither will you. No touching final reunion will ever be performed in this play. Nothing will be revealed or redeemed or healed. The story will simply stop. The players will run out of text. They will walk off the stage in mid-scene or even in the middle of a line. Suddenly the main character - don't call him the hero - will simply be gone, and you will never see him again. He will die alone at some undetermined time in the future, out of sight of history. He will leave the world the way he came into it - alone, unknown, unrecorded. Nobody, not even he, knows where he came from, and nobody will know when and where he goes.”
― James Hynes, Sparrow

“So perhaps you're not surprised by the difference between the two faces each man wears - not tragedy and comedy, like the dramatist's masks, but banker and panting beast, scribe and trembling lover, tradesman and rutting animal.”
― James Hynes, Sparrow

“I have lifted the rock and seen the worms writhing underneath.”
― James Hynes, Sparrow

“Nothing human is alien to me, says the playwright, but men were alien to me, because I didn't think they were people. It never entered my imagination that I might grow up to become one of them.”
― James Hynes, Sparrow

“I live in a library now, surrounded by the greatest works of literature in the world, but I’m here to tell you, reader, literature is not the foundation of civilization. The foundation of civilization is hot water. Civilization is plumbing.”
― James Hynes, Sparrow

“If I am Sparrow, and Sparrow is me, is it possible that someday he will watch from his cage as I fly straight up into the blue, getting smaller and smaller, shrinking from the outline of a bird to a pair of wings to a squiggle to a dot, until I vanish?”
― James Hynes, Sparrow