Hera’s Reviews > An Image of My Name Enters America: Essays > Status Update

"[T]he human project is totally incoherent. [...] People could choose to behave otherwise, yet they never do. It astounds me. People never stop to consider their own beliefs."

"[Seven Brides for Seven Brothers]' other cherished notion is that it is OK to do violent, criminal things if one does them as part of a group. OK to abduct people, OK to organize a lynching party, OK to "settle" the West, OK to marry the nominally willing, OK to produce families of seven or more children, OK to do it because a mob does it, OK to do it because a nation does so."

"I must take advantage of this narrow opening in my heart."

"I want to remember. Yet, what I want to know even more, what I retain an insatiable hunger for, is knowledge of my relations' lack of desire for memory. It is not history that they have thrown away, for they do not have that power, but rather key parts of their own intimate experience."

"From the Latin imago, image may indicate a three-dimensional representation, such as sculpture; above all, it has to do with imitation [...] Images are not exclusively ocular. Much as memory is not exclusively ocular."

"The past is a paradox: although we have dwelled in it when it used to be the present, now it can no longer admit our bodies. [...] Memory images, a strange sort of naturally occurring psychic media, are generated by the inexorable movement of the arrow of time, as what was once the inhabited present becomes the permanently foreclosed past."

"Something loose and heavy wobbled in the air. It made an abstract noise, as if it desired to fall into place."

"On the one hand, the poet shows advanced control of the literary language. On the other, What the fuck?"

"Don't fall into that trap, I'll think. Don't become old and stiff and cruel and forget that you are living. Remain vulnerable, I'll tell myself."