Props Quotes

“People want things to be real. If you give them an excuse, they'll believe you.”
― Robin Sloan, Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore

“Performing magic in the live show thrills me. Just get me a deck of cards and some attentive audience, and I have made my day and theirs too”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“In the film Death and the Maiden, there is a point during which Sigourney Weaver has duct-taped Ben Kingsley to a chair in her living room. The characters are re-enacting a reverse torture scene. To move the plot of a woman tortured toward its desire: to torture the torturer. To extract a confession.

The chair is a prop.

A prop is a stage object that supports the drama.

If the audience suspends their disbelief the chair transforms itself in time and space. If the audience is left unconvinced the chair is silly and imaginable in anyone’s living room.

In the film Romeo is Bleeding Lena Olin sits in a chair and spreads her legs so that her cunt can be seen/scene. Her nationality keeps slipping; she is what we want her to be in a million ways. Her severed arm our severed arms. Her mouth opening like a country.

In the film Exotica Atom Egoyan has the male lead (primary actor, financial draw) sit in a chair immobile while a child-stripper dances excruciatingly close to his body. His hands on his thighs. His mouth open. His mind seated. Torture.

In the film Barbarella Jane Fonda is trapped inside of a science fiction sexual orgasm chair. This is before her politics come.

In the film Breaker Morant two men mutated soldiers lost are executed—shot through the chest—while seated in chairs.

In my kitchen I jack my father off while he sits in a chair, my hand smally domestic, the back of the chair holding his back, the legs of the chair forgiving his weight, the wood of the chair blonde, the hair of the girl blonde, the room magnified to cinematic proportions.”
― Lidia Yuknavitch, Liberty's Excess: Fictions

“All the magicians have 52 mutual friends.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“For a professional magician, a stack of playing cards is as good as a stack of money.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“A magician may step out without a purse, but he should never step out without a pack of playing cards.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“Mannequin heads with crushed orbital bones and humorous growths. Stacks of newborn babies. Eyeballs trailing rubbery pink muscles, like a school of prehistoric jellyfish. Viv always laughed when she thought of how Tim described Mandy: "Dr. Frankenstein with a hoarding issue.”
― Vicki Grant, Tell Me When You Feel Something