Plainwater: Essays and Poetry
Quotes from the Book
There's more than two to a story -- the doers, the done-tos, and the ones who interpret who's who.
His eyes they held the most dangerous thing, they held the top of the sins. Indifference. Indifference. A vacancy where human care should be.
Translators build the bridges. The chasm between languages is a deep ravine of silence. So what can we do but trust that the translators' bridges are sturdy, will carry the weight of meaning from one side of the ravine to the other? But all these bridges are faulty. Hitches and chinks because one language cannot cross over to another language unaltered and unflawed.
You grow up to believe that if you say, Please pass the salt, a person will reach toward the shaker, grab it in his hand, and move it in your direction. But then one day some of us might learn that it can happen that you can say, Please pass the salt, and a person will jam his hand into the mayonnaise jar and fling a fistful of it at your face. All at once, words don't mean what they're supposed to mean. I am a girl. My name is Io. I say no thanks, not me, stop please. But all at once, words do not matter. I do not matter.
[...] What happens when the boundaries dissolve? Yout borders mean nothing. What lives at the limits of loss? Of hate? What terrible place is that? Look at me. I have been. I know. Do not come to this place where everything is fanged and singed and whimpering. [...] No one deserves de horror that has washed my life. I do not matter. This country does not matter, not to me, not in this hour. Keep indifference out of you. [...] You will hear my yowls in the night, I who am a dog. When the darkness hoards the day, you will hear my yowls and you will remember this sadness. This sadness without boundary, born from loss, born from the dissolving of all the borerlines that made a world make sense,. My howls, the howls of this dog you see before you, they will penetrate the soft edges of your brain while you sleep, and for a moment, as your dream turns sideways, we will not be separate. We will be as one.
The water holds all of you
You are never, never too old to be changed by love.
There's such a thing as too much love. It's possible to lose yourself.
We were so alive together.
Not all lives are large. Not all stories are sad.
The act of art is metamorphosis.
When men feel small they are dangerous.
We are all swallowed up each moment into the whole history of new.
[...] What happens when the boundaries dissolve? Your borders mean nothing. What lives at the limits of loss? Of hate? What terrible place is that? Look at me. I have been. I know. Do not come to this place where everything is fanged and singed and whimpering. [...] No one deserves de horror that has washed my life. I do not matter. This country does not matter, not to me, not in this hour. Keep indifference out of you. [...] You will hear my yowls in the night, I who am a dog. When the darkness hoards the day, you will hear my yowls and you will remember this sadness. This sadness without boundary, born from loss, born from the dissolving of all the borerlines that made a world make sense,. My howls, the howls of this dog you see before you, they will penetrate the soft edges of your brain while you sleep, and for a moment, as your dream turns sideways, we will not be separate. We will be as one.
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About Nina MacLaughlin
About the book
In fierce, textured voices, the women of Ovid's Metamorphoses claim their stories and challenge the power of mythI am the home of this story. After thousands of years of other people's tellings, of all these different bridges, of words gotten wrong, I'll tell it myself.
Seductresses and she-monsters, nymphs and demi-goddesses, populate the famous myths of Ovid's Metamorphoses. But what happens when the story of the chase comes in the voice of the woman fleeing her rape? When the beloved coolly returns the seducer's gaze? When tales of monstrous transfiguration are sung by those transformed? In voices both mythic and modern, Wake, Siren revisits each account of love, loss, rape, revenge, and change. It lays bare the violence that undergirds and lurks in the heart of Ovid's narratives, stories that helped build and perpetuate the distorted portrayal of women across centuries of art and
Book details
- First published
- 2019
- Author
- Nina MacLaughlin
- Genre
- Fantasy
- Goodreads rating
- 3.80 (2k ratings)
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