Caty > Caty's Quotes

“Britta wanted to try to turn a guard. Tamara thought it was idiotic.

“What are you going to do? Buy him beer and tell him about Kropotkin?”

I envisioned the conversation:

Vanguard: Wage Slave, are you aware that you are but a wire nail in the toolbox of capitalism?
Wage Slave: I thought I was a chisel.
Vanguard: No, the petit bourgeois are the chisels.
Wage Slave: What about a washer set? Can I be a washer set?
Vanguard: No, my ferret, run free! For I have unlocked your collar with knowledge!
Wage Slave: I want to be a chisel.

Vanguard pushes screaming ferret through hole in fence cut by the clippers of noblesse oblige.

“Well, maybe we could bribe him,” said Britta. Tamara laughed.

“With what? Health insurance?”
― Vanessa Veselka, Zazen

“Radical feminists didn’t need FBI infiltration — the mechanism for sisterly cannibalization was already well under way.”
― Susie Bright, Big Sex Little Death: A Memoir

“I was immensely moved by this novel when I read it recently and yet I cannot think of anything to say about it except that it is wonderful. The people are not characters, there is no plot in the usual sense. What can you bring to bear: verisimilitude — to what? You can merely say over and over that it is very good, very beautiful, that when you were reading it you were happy.”
― Elizabeth Hardwick, Seduction and Betrayal

“OMG YOU GUYS it has come to my attention that SOMEONE on the internet is saying that my fictional 19th century zombies are NOT SCIENTIFICALLY SOUND. Naturally, I am crushed. To think, IF ONLY I’d consulted with a zombologist or two before sitting down to write, I could’ve avoided ALL THIS EMBARRASSMENT.”
― Cherie Priest

“The word book acted as a transient stimulus”
― Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre

“I am not so much fun
Anymore;
Couldn’t carry the role of ingenue
In a bucket, you say, laughing.

And I want to punch you.
I was never innocent, but
Thanks to you I know things
I wish I did not remember.

You don’t like it
When I talk to the man myself,
Specifying quantities and
Give him the money
Instead of giving it to you
And letting you take care of it.

You keep asking me,
Where’s the dope?
Until I finally say,
I hid it.
The look you give me is
Pure bile.

Well, fuck you.
This isn’t like Buying somebody a drink.
You don’t leave your stash out
Where I might find it.

Finally I think I’ve made you wait
Long enough,
So I get out the little paper envelope
And hand it to you.
You are still in charge of
This part, so you relax.
Performing your junky ritual with
Your favorite razor blade, until
I ask you how to calculate my dose
So I won’t O.D. when I do this
And you’re not around.

Then you really flip.
You tell me it’s a bad idea
For me to do this with other people.

**

Was it such a good idea
For me to do it with you?
Do you wait for me to turn up
Once every three months
So you can get high?
Is this our version of that famous
Lesbian fight about
Nonmonogamy?

Let me tell you what I don’t like.

I don’t like it when you
Take forever to cut up brown powder
And cook it down and
Suck it up into the needle
And measure it, then take
Three times as much for yourself
AS you give me.

I don’t like it when you
Fuck me
After you’ve taken the needle
Out of my arm.

You talk too much
And spoil my rush.
All I really want to do
Is listen to the tides of blood
Wash around inside my body
Telling me everything is
Fine, fine, fine._
And I certainly don’t want to
Eat you or fuck you
Because it will take forever
To make you come,
If you can come at all,
And by then the smack will have worn off
And there isn’t any more.

I’m trying to remember
What the part is that I do like.
I think this shit likes me
A lot more than I like it.

Now you’re hurt and angry because
I don’t want to see you again
And the truth is,
I would love to see you,
As long as I knew you were holding.

So you tell me
Is this what you want?
I bet it was what you wanted
All along.”
― Patrick Califia

“I read Wolfe’s new book _ The Story of a Novel_ and as usual he stole the whole damn thing from me. I am going to write and say will you please stop writing books you bastard.”
― Jean Stafford

“Well, what of it? If sex isn’t a joke, what is it”
― Nella Larsen, Passing

“There were no passing cars to call out to. You couldn’t call for help from a police car, anyway; he didn’t think you could.”
― Dorothy B. Hughes, The Expendable Man

“That 'writers write' is meant to be self-evident. People like to say it. I find it is hardly ever true. Writers drink. Writers rant. Writers phone. Writers sleep. I have met very few writers who write at all.”
― Renata Adler, Speedboat

“…he knew no other pleasure but what consisted in opposition.”
― James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner

“I haven’t got time to be neurotic,” he had heard Helen say once; and the words had made him go weak with anger. He had thought it was the most stupid and reactionary remark he ever heard in his life; but was it any more stupid than the sneering thrust he had made in reply: “Time! You haven’t got the imagination!”
― Charles Jackson, The Lost Weekend

“I love the laconic. Clearly, I am not of their number.”
― Renata Adler, Speedboat

“It is to be hoped you are not ‘intellectual,’ which is an unpardonable trait”
― Mary MacLane, I Await the Devil's Coming

“I live an immoral life. It is immoral because it is deadly futile.”
― Mary MacLane, I, Mary MacLane: A Diary of Human Days

“…They used the fail-safe method for undergraduate work at any solid institution: take two utterly unrelated things or matters and show that they are, if not in fact identical, actually related in the most profound and subtle sense.”
― Renata Adler, Speedboat

“The girls were always running out of money, out of cash, precisely, to pay taxi drivers, train conductors, men who delivered pizzas after dark. They borrowed cash, normally, upon arrival. They borrowed passions—Wallace Stevens, Joseph Conrad, Mozart, hiking, the Bible—from each other, as girls of another generation borrowed clothes.”
― Renata Adler, Speedboat

“This book is written in blood.

Is it written entirely in blood?

No, some of it is written in tears.

Are the blood and tears all mine?

Yes, they have been in the past, but the future is a different matter.

As the bear swore in Pogo after having endured a pot shoved on her head, being turned upside down while still in the pot, a discussion about her edibility, the lawnmowering of her behind, and a fistful of ground pepper in the snoot, she then swore a mighty oath on the ashes of her mothers (i.e. her forebears) grimly but quietly while the apples from the shaken apple tree above her dropped bang thud on her head:

OH, SOMEBODY ASIDES ME IS GONNA RUE THIS HERE PARTICULAR DAY.”
― Joanna Russ, The Female Man

“A room is, after all, a place where you hide from the wolves. That's all any room is.”
― Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight

“Prostitution gives her an opportunity to meet people. It provides fresh air and wholesome exercise, and it keeps her out of trouble.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“The encounter did not leave behind with Chief Inspector Heat that satisfactory sense of superiority the members of the police force get from the unofficial but intimate side of their intercourse with the criminal classes, by which the vanity of power is soothed, and the vulgar love of domination over our fellow creatures is flattered as worthily as it deserves.”
― Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent

“Ossip, I think you are a humbug...you are not even a doctor. But you are funny. Your notion of a humanity universally putting out the tongue and taking the pill from pole to pole at the bidding of a few solemn jokers is worthy of the prophet....”
― Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent

“What would a narrative of happiness be like? All that can be described is what prepares it, and then what destroys it.”
― Andre Gide, The Immoralist

“Miss Chancellor would have been much happier if the movements she was interested in could have been carried on only by people she liked,and if revolutions, somehow, didn't always have to begin with one's self--with internal convulsions,sacrifices,executions.”
― Henry James, The Bostonians

“Jack said, 'The only friends we don't spare--who do not escape our scrutiny--are our lovers and those who become our enemies.”
― Robert Glick

“You go to someone and you think, 'I’ll tell him this.' But why? The impulse is that the telling is going to relieve you. And that’s why you feel awful later—you’ve relieved yourself, and if it truly is tragic and awful, it’s not better, it’s worse—the exhibitionism inherent to a confession has only made the misery worse.”
― Philip Roth, American Pastoral

“This kindly unjudging judgment of the Swede could well have been a new development in Jerry, compassion a few hours old. That can happen when people die--the argument with them drops away and people so flawed while they were drawing breath that at times they were all but unbearable now assert themselves in the most appealing way, and what was least to your liking the day before yesterday becomes in the limousine behind the hearse a cause not only for sympathetic amusement but for admiration. In which estimate lies the greater reality--the uncharitable one permitted us before the funeral, forged, without any claptrap, in the skirmish of daily life, or the one that suffuses us with sadness at the family gathering afterward--this even an outsider can't judge. The sight of a coffin can effect a great change of heart--all at once you find you are not so disappointed in the person who is dead--but what the sight of a coffin does for a mind in its search for the truth, this I don't profess to know.”
― Philip Roth, American Pastoral

“Consult.../what reinforcement we may gain from hope,/If not, what resolution from despair.”
― John Milton, Paradise Lost

“A word after a word after a word is power.”
― Margaret Atwood

“Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.”
― Margaret Atwood