Francesca Lia Block Quotes

“What shall we do, all of us? All of us oassionate girls who fear crushing the boys we love with our mouths like caverns of teeth, our mushrooming brains, our watermelon hearts?”
― Francesca Lia Block

“If Los Angeles is a woman reclining billboard model and the San Fernando Valley is her teenybopper sister, then New York is their cousin. Her hair is dyed autumn red or aubergine or Egyptian henna, depending on her mood. Her skin is pale as frost and she wears beautiful Jil Sander suits and Prada pumps on which she walks faster than a speeding taxi (when it is caught in rush hour, that is). Her lips are some unlikely shade of copper or violet, courtesy of her local MAC drag queen makeup consultant. She is always carrying bags of clothes, bouquets of roses, take-out Chinese containers, or bagels. Museum tags fill her pockets and purses, along with perfume samples and invitations to art gallery openings. When she is walking to work, to ward off bums or psychos, her face resembles the Statue of Liberty, but at home in her candlelit, dove-colored apartment, the stony look fades away and she smiles like the sterling roses she has brought for herself to make up for the fact that she is single and her feet are sore.”
― Francesca Lia Block, I Was a Teenage Fairy

“You can't doubt so much, Psyche”
― Francesca Lia Block

“He squinted up at the straining muscular backs of the stone men supporing the dome. "You'll have to take me to some museums," he said. He was being the young man on the road, following the sun because gray weather made him suicidal, writing his poetry in his mind in diners and gas station men's rooms across the country. "But I did see a show of Hopper once. And I like his light. It was kind of lonely or something.

Or, "The world's a mess, it's in my kiss,' like John and Exene say," he mumbled. We were in a leather store on Market Street being punks on acid with skunk-striped hair and steel-toed boots.”
― Francesca Lia Block, Echo

“They were laughing and their hair was shining like leaves in moonlight, their limbs long as saplings. I thought, Girls are magical at this phase, girls are invincible, nothing can touch them. I didn’t think ‘us’ because I didn’t feel that; I felt other, on the outside, watching them.”
― Francesca Lia Block, Love in the Time of Global Warming

“When you look at pain as material it makes all the difference in the world. I thought, the pain that is too big to be eased by its use as material would be a pain I couldn't (and wouldn't want to) even imagine.”
― Francesca Lia Block, Violet & Claire

“I can arrange words on a page but I can't seem to organize books on a shelf. Over the years, My Secret has shelved thousands and thousands, held each one in his hands. He thinks they might have seeped into him, through his skin, as much as the books he's read. At night and on his days off we spend hours talking about writing. He reads three or four books at a time. When he's not working at the bookstore he goes to other bookstores around the city and browses until closing time. Holding more volumes in his hands, filling himself up with words.”
― Francesca Lia Block, The Thorn Necklace: Healing Through Writing and the Creative Process

“What else was filmmmaking about if not a series of perfect and potent images strung together like the words of a poem?”
― Francesca Lia Block, Violet & Claire