Eilean *:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ > Recent Status Updates

On Rego’s Depression Series: “These long skirted women are somehow ageless, universal. They could be the Bronte sisters, or Elizabeth Barrett Browning, or Virginia Woolf, or ourselves, or our mothers, yet in Rego’s hands, as with all her girls and women, they are neither pathologised or shamed.”

On the Bronte sisters: “They are very serious, wounded, longing women, conscious of all the romance of literature and of their own fragility and suffering”

“We are not born a woman, we become one
We are not born from marble
We become it”

“I tell you I tell you I can barely conceive of any writer in whom there is not a longing for both oblivion and applause; my childhood is the bone that broke my teeth and from which I gnaw at shards of memory.”

“I have cultivated my hysteria with delight and terror; I have felt the wing of madness pass over my eyes and an orgy of words pour from my lips; I voice my lament with full ardour at the feet of writers who are nothing but beautiful prisoners enslaved to the evil flower of fame which like a log in the fireplace always smokes the room”

“As unconscious as the primitive life that pulses in the blind and deaf trees, in the tiny insects that are born, fly, die and are reborn without witnesses.”

“I took refuge in madness because reason was not enough for me”

“I lost sight of myself so long ago that I am hesitant to try and find myself. I am afraid to begin. Existing sometimes gives me heart palpitations. I’m so afraid to be me. I’m so dangerous. They gave me a name and alienated me from myself.”

“The shadow of my soul is my body. My body is the shadow of my soul.”

“I shall think of you everyday, many times a day. Your handprints are all over my body. Your flesh is my flesh. You deciphered me and now I am plain to read.”

“I felt like a seed in a pomegranate. Some say that the pomegranate was the real apple of Eve, fruit of the womb, I would eat my way into perdition to taste you.”

“Did those people lie awake at night hiding their hearts while giving their bodies?”

“I didn’t only want Louise’s flesh, I wanted her bones, her blood, her tissues, the sinews that bound her together. I would have held her to me though time had stripped away the tones and textures of her skin. I could have held her for a thousand years until the skeleton itself rubbed away to dust. What are you that makes me feel thus? Who are you for whom time has no meaning?

“I fed you plums the colour of bruises. Nature is fecund but fickle. One year she leaves you to starve, the next year she kills you with love. That year the branches were torn beneath the weight, this year they sing in the wind. There are no ripe plums in august.”

“I thought how easy it is to destroy the past and how difficult it is to forget it”

“Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.”

“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”

“I received enough strength and anger to have the desire and ambition to give women a place in literature, amid this ensemble of voices.”

“Avenging my people and avenging my sex would, from that time on, be one and the same thing.”

Hurt me. Until I am outside pain.

Bruise on my eyebrow. Beautiful beautiful thing. This is the closest thing to love.

“A race had begun between death and torture. I asked myself how one manages to go on living when someone you love has called out to you ‘have pity on me’ in vain”

A full blooded, spirited woman lived on inside her, but a stranger to herself, deformed and mutilated.

“Death itself does not frighten me; it is the jump that I am afraid of”