“The love between a writer and a reader is never celebrated.”
― Patricia Duncker, quote from Hallucinating Foucault
“All writers are, somewhere or other, mad. Not les grands fous, like Rimbaud, but mad, yes, mad. Because we do not believe in the stability of reality. We know that it can fragment, like a sheet of glass or a car's windscreen. but we also know that reality can be invented, reordered, constructed, remade. Writing is, in itself, an act of violence perpetrated against reality.”
― Patricia Duncker, quote from Hallucinating Foucault
“Well -- there are two kinds of loneliness, aren't there? There's the loneliness of absolute solitude -- the physical fact of living alone, working alone, as I have always done. This need not be painful. For many writers it's necessary. Others need a female staff of family servants to type their bloody books and keep the their egos afloat. Being alone for most of the day means that you listen to different rhythms, which are not determined by other people. I think it's better so. But there is another kind of loneliness which is terrible to endure....And that is the loneliness of seeing a different world from that of the people around you. Their lives remain remote from yours. You can see the gulf and they can't. You live among them. They walk on earth. You walk on glass. They reassure themselves with conformity, with carefully constructed resemblances. You are masked, aware of your absolute difference.”
― Patricia Duncker, quote from Hallucinating Foucault
“We articulate our fears, like children in the dark, giving them names in order to tame them.”
― Patricia Duncker, quote from Hallucinating Foucault
“You can say anything, anything, if it is beautifully said.”
― Patricia Duncker, quote from Hallucinating Foucault
“You write your first novel with the desperation of the damned. You're afraid that you'll never write anything else, ever again.”
― Patricia Duncker, quote from Hallucinating Foucault
“The love between writer and a reader is never celebrated. It can never be proved to exist. But he was the man I loved most. He was the reader for whom I wrote.
That’s what my writing was. Messages in bottles.”
― Patricia Duncker, quote from Hallucinating Foucault
“Ja pričam priče. Mi svi izmišljamo priče. Pričat ću ti priče koje će te nasmijati. Volim da te gledam kako se smiješ. Nikad neću pobjeći iz ovog zatvora beskrajnih priča.”
― Patricia Duncker, quote from Hallucinating Foucault
“Sav svoj novac je trošila na kupovinu knjiga, a sve vrijeme na njihovo čitanje. Sve su bile ispisane kritikama, odgovorima na marginama, ponekad su među njih bile umetnute čitave stranice komentara. Šunjala se kroz stoljeća pisanja, ostavljajući svoj znak kud god bi išla.”
― Patricia Duncker, quote from Hallucinating Foucault
“Madness and passion have always been interchangeable. Throughout the entire western literary tradition. Madness is an abundance of existence. Madness is a way of asking difficult questions. What did he mean, the powerless tyrant king? O Fool, I shall go mad.
Maybe madness is the excess of possibility,.... And writingis about reducing possibility to ne idea, one book, one sentence, one word. Madness is a form of self-expression. It is the opposite of creativity. You cannot make anything that can be separated from yourself if you are mad. And yet, look at Rimbaud -- and your wonderful Christopher Smart. But don't harbour any romantic ideas about what it means to be mad. My language was my protection, my guarantee against madness and when there was no one to listen my language vanished along with my reader.”
― Patricia Duncker, quote from Hallucinating Foucault
“Svi pisci su, na jedan ili drugi način, ludi. Jer mi ne vjerujemo u stabilnost stvarnosti. Mi znamo da se ona može raspasti kao komad stakla ili šoferšajba na autu. Ali mi također znamo da stvarnost može biti ponovo izmišljena, može joj se promijeniti redoslijed, može se izgraditi, ponovo napraviti. Pisanje je, samo po sebi, čin nasilja počinjenog protiv stvarnosti. Zar ne misliš i ti tako, petit? Mi to uradimo, ostavimo napisano, i iskrademo se neprimjetno...”
― Patricia Duncker, quote from Hallucinating Foucault
“Kao pobijeđeni revolucionar napustila je svoje seksualne barikade. Nešto se u njoj slomilo, nježno, tiho i nevoljko, i zagnjurila je lice u udubljenje između mog ramena i uha, ne opirući se. Bio sam veoma uznemiren njenom neobičnom nježnošću i tiho sam joj pričao ni o čemu naročitom dok nije zaspala u mom naručju.”
― Patricia Duncker, quote from Hallucinating Foucault
“I stared at the changing patterns on the back of his white shirt as he moved under the trees.”
― Patricia Duncker, quote from Hallucinating Foucault
“But...if it's so awful and difficult who not try to become a group? Be accepted?
He glittered at me for a moment, then said, I would rather be mad.”
― Patricia Duncker, quote from Hallucinating Foucault
“Ludilo i strast su se uvijek izmjenjivali. Kroz cijelu zapadnu književnu tradiciju. Ludilo je obilje egzistencije. Ludilo je način postavljanja teških pitanja.”
― Patricia Duncker, quote from Hallucinating Foucault
“And that is the loneliness of seeing a different world from that of the people around you. Their lives remain remote from yours. You can see the gulf and they can't.”
― Patricia Duncker, quote from Hallucinating Foucault
“Excess is essential to the production of austerity.”
― Patricia Duncker, quote from Hallucinating Foucault
“Maybe when you care, terribly, painfully, about the shape of the world, and you desire nothing but absolute, radical change, you protect yourself with abstraction, distance.”
― Patricia Duncker, quote from Hallucinating Foucault
Patricia Duncker
Born place: in Kingston, Jamaica
Born date June 29, 1951
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“She’s kept her love for him as alive as the summer they first met. In order to do this, she’s turned life away. Sometimes she subsists for days on water and air. Being the only known complex life-form to do this, she should have a species named after her. Once Uncle Julian told me how the sculptor and painter Alberto Giacometti said that sometimes just to paint a head you have to give up the whole figure. To paint a leaf, you have to sacrifice the whole landscape. It might seem like you’re limiting yourself at first, but after a while you realize that having a quarter-of-an-inch of something you have a better chance of holding on to a certain feeling of the universe than if you pretended to be doing the whole sky.
My mother did not choose a leaf or a head. She chose my father. And to hold on to a certain feeling, she sacrificed the world.”
― Nicole Krauss, quote from The History of Love
“I love books, by the way, way more than movies. Movies tell you what to think. A good book lets you choose a few thoughts for yourself.”
― Karen Marie Moning, quote from Darkfever
“How soon will someone speak the word the resentful millions will understand: the word to be, to act, to live?”
― Richard Wright, quote from Native Son
“Learn to see what you are looking at.”
― Christopher Paolini, quote from Inheritance
“She was particularly curious about the Viginians, wondering if, as slaveholders, they had the necessary commitment to the cause of freedom. "I have," she wrote, "sometimes been ready to think that the passions for liberty cannot be equally strong in the breasts of those who have been accustomed to deprive their fellow creature of theirs." What she felt about those in Massachusetts who owned slaves, including her own father, she did not say, but she need not have--John knew her mind on the subject. Writing to him during the First Congress, she had been unmistakably clear: "I wish most sincerely there was not a slave in the province. It always seemed a most iniquitous scheme to me--[to] fight ourselves for what we are daily robbing and plundering from those who have as good a right to freedom as we have.”
― David McCullough, quote from John Adams
A Skinful of Shadows
The Emperor's Handbo...
Day
Carry the Ocean
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