Marin Mitchell > Marin's Quotes

“I choose to love this time for once
with all my intelligence

-from "Splittings”
― Adrienne Rich, The Dream of a Common Language

“Good food is very often, even most often, simple food.”
― Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly

“I had a romance novel inside me, but I paid three sailors to beat it out of me with steel pipes.”
― Patton Oswalt

“The hardest part has been learning how to take myself seriously when the entire world is constantly telling me that femininity is always inferior to masculinity”
― Julia Serano, Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity

“Femininity is depicted as weakness, the sapping of strength, yet masculinity is so fragile that apparently even the slightest brush with the feminine destroys it.”
― Gwen Sharp

“Nolite te bastardes carborundorum. Don't let the bastards grind you down.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors.”
― Adrienne Rich

“I could never trust anyone who's well adjusted to a sick society.”
― Andrea Gibson

“Do you think anger is a sincere emotion or the timid motion of a fragile heart trying to beat away its pain?”
― Andrea Gibson

“Autumn is the hardest season. The leaves are all falling, and they're falling like
they're falling in love with the ground.”
― Andrea Gibson

“I said to the sun, ‘Tell me about the big bang.’ The sun said, ‘it hurts to become.”
― Andrea Gibson

“That night when you kissed me, I left a poem in your mouth, and you can hear some of the lines every time you breathe out.”
― Andrea Gibson

“Who writes your name in letters of smoke among the stars of the south?
Oh let me remember you as you were before you existed.”
― Pablo Neruda, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

“And I watch my words from a long way off.
They are more yours than mine.
They climb on my old suffering like ivy.”
― Pablo Neruda, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

“How you must have suffered getting accustomed to me,
my savage, solitary soul, my name that sends them all running.
So many times we have seen the morning star burn, kissing our eyes,
and over our heads the grey light unwinds in turning fans.”
― Pablo Neruda, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

“It will take all your heart, it will take all your breath
It will be short, it will not be simple”
― Adrienne Rich

“My heart is moved by all I cannot save:
so much has been destroyed
I have to cast my lot with those
who age after age, perversely,
with no extraordinary power,
reconstitute the world.”
― Adrienne Rich

“The serious revolutionary, like the serious artist, can't afford to lead a sentimental or self-deceiving life.”
― Adrienne Rich

“I am an instrument in the shape/ of a woman trying to translate pulsations/ into images for the relief of the body/ and the reconstruction of the mind.”
― Adrienne Rich, The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems Selected and New, 1950-1984

“The longer I live the more I mistrust
theatricality, the false glamour cast
by performance, the more I know its poverty beside
the truths we are salvaging from
the splitting-open of our lives.

-from "Transcendental Etude”
― Adrienne Rich, The Dream of a Common Language

“FINAL NOTATIONS

it will not be simple, it will not be long
it will take little time, it will take all your thought
it will take all your heart, it will take all your breath
it will be short, it will not be simple

it will touch you through your ribs, it will take all your heart
it will not be long, it will occupy your thought
as a city is occupied, as a bed is occupied
it will take all your flesh, it will not be simple

you are coming into us who cannot withstand you
you are coming into us who never wanted to withstand you
you are taking parts of us into places never planned
you are going far away with pieces of our lives

it will be short, it will take all your breath
it will not be simple, it will become your will”
― Adrienne Rich, An Atlas of the Difficult World

“Genius is the recovery of childhood at will.”
― Arthur Rimbaud

“I have stretched ropes from steeple to steeple; Garlands from window to window; Golden chains from star to star ... And I dance.”
― Arthur Rimbaud, Complete Works

“The real damage is done by those millions who want to 'survive.' The honest men who just want to be left in peace. Those who don’t want their little lives disturbed by anything bigger than themselves. Those with no sides and no causes. Those who won’t take measure of their own strength, for fear of antagonizing their own weakness. Those who don’t like to make waves—or enemies. Those for whom freedom, honour, truth, and principles are only literature. Those who live small, mate small, die small. It’s the reductionist approach to life: if you keep it small, you’ll keep it under control. If you don’t make any noise, the bogeyman won’t find you. But it’s all an illusion, because they die too, those people who roll up their spirits into tiny little balls so as to be safe. Safe?! From what? Life is always on the edge of death; narrow streets lead to the same place as wide avenues, and a little candle burns itself out just like a flaming torch does. I choose my own way to burn.”
― Sophie Scholl