β
Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.
β
β
Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)
β
Desire is no light thing.
β
β
Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)
β
Reality is a sound, you have to tune in to it not just keep yelling.
β
β
Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)
β
Under the seams runs the pain.
β
β
Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)
β
I believe in recognizing every human being as a human being--neither white, black, brown, or red; and when you are dealing with humanity as a family there's no question of integration or intermarriage. It's just one human being marrying another human being or one human being living around and with another human being.
β
β
Malcolm X (The Autobiography of Malcolm X)
β
He came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet.
β
β
Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)
β
A man moves through time. It means nothing except that, like a harpoon, once thrown he will arrive.
β
β
Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)
β
Time isn't made of anything. It is an abstraction. Just a meaning that we impose upon motion.
β
β
Anne Carson
β
They were two superior eels
at the bottom of the tank and they recognized each other like italics.
β
β
Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)
β
Sometimes a journey makes itself necessary.
β
β
Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)
β
How does distance look?" is a simple direct question. It extends from a spaceless within to the edge of what can be loved.
β
β
Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)
β
What is an adjective? Nouns name the world. Verbs activate the names. Adjectives come from somewhere else. The word adjective (epitheton in Greek) is itself an adjective meaning 'placed on top', 'added', 'appended', 'foreign'. Adjectives seem fairly innocent additions, but look again. These small imported mechanisms are in charge of attaching everything in the world to its place in particularity. They are the latches of being.
β
β
Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)
β
Not touching but joined in astonishment as two cuts lie parallel in the same flesh.
β
β
Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)
β
There is no person without a world.
β
β
Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)
β
When they made love
Geryon liked to touch in slow succession each of the bones of Herakles' back
as it arched away from him into who knows what dark dream of its own, running both hands all the way down
from the base of the neck
to the end of the spine which he can cause to shiver like a root in the rain.
β
β
Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)
β
Meanwhile music pounded / across hearts opening every valve to the desperate drama of being / a self in a song.
β
β
Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)
β
Depression is one of the unknown modes of being.
There are no words for a world without a self, seen with impersonal clarity.
All language can register is the slow return
to oblivion we call health when imagination automatically recolors the landscape
and habit blurs perception and language
takes up its routine flourishes.
β
β
Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)
β
You doubt God? Well more to the point I credit God with the good sense to doubt me. What is mortality after all but divine doubt flashing over us? For an instant God suspends assent and poof! we disappear.
β
β
Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)
β
Then a miracle occurred in the form of a plate of sandwiches.
Geryon took three and buried his mouth in a delicious block of white bread filled with tomatoes and butter and salt.
He thought about how delicious it was, how he liked slippery foods, how slipperiness can be of different kinds.
I am a philosopher of sandwiches, he decided. Things good on the inside.
β
β
Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)
β
Small, red, and upright he waited,
gripping his new bookbag tight
in one hand and touching a lucky penny inside his coat pocket with the other,
while the first snows of winter
floated down on his eyelashes and covered the branches around him and silenced
all trace of the world.
β
β
Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)
β
...there it was one of those moments that is the opposite of blindness.
β
β
Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)
β
I will never know how you see red and you will never know how I see it.
β
β
Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)
β
A refugee population is hungry for language and aware that anything can happen.
β
β
Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)
β
...And tonightβGeryon? You okay?
Yes fine, I'm listening. Tonightβ?
Why do you have your jacket over your head?
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Can't hear you Geryon. The jacket shifted. Geryon peered out. I said sometimes
I need a little privacy.
β
β
Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)
β
Geryon was a monster everything about him was red
β
β
Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)
β
And now time is rushing towards them
Β
where they stand side by side with arms touching, immortality on their faces,
Β
night at their back.
β
β
Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)
β
Four of the roses were on fire.
They stood up straight and pure on the stalk, gripping the dark like prophets
and howling colossal intimacies
from the back of their fused throats.
- XXVII. MITWELT
β
β
Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)
β
It was the hour when snow goes blue
and streetlights come on and a hare may
pause on the tree line as still as a word in a book.
β
β
Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)
β
He was trying to fit this Herakles onto the one he knew.
β
β
Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)
β
Are there many little boys who think they are a
Monster? But in my case I am right said Geryon to the
Dog they were sitting on the bluffs The dog regarded him
Joyfully
β
β
Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)
β
She stumbled then and Geryon caught her other arm, it was like a handful of autumn. He felt huge and wrong. When is it polite to let go someoneβs arm after you grab it?
β
β
Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)
β
The red world And corresponding red breezes
Went on Geryon did not
β
β
Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)
β
Outside, the natural world was enjoying a moment of total strength.
β
β
Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)
β
He had a respect for facts maybe this was one.
β
β
Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)
β
β¦..in that blurred state between awake and asleep when too many intake valves are open in the soul. Like the terrestial crust of the earth which is proportionately 10 times thinner than an eggshell, the skin of the soul is a miracle of mutual pressures. Millions of kilograms of force pounding up from earthβs core on the inside to meet the cold air of the world and stop as we do, just in time.
β
β
Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)
β
And now time is rushing towards them
where they stand side by side with arms touching, immortality on their faces, night at their back.
β
β
Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)
β
Lava bread makes you passionate.
β
β
Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)
β
...some hours later they were down
at the railroad tracks
standing close together by the switch lights. The huge night moved overhead
scattering drops of itself.
β
β
Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)
β
As in childhood we live sweeping close to the sky and now, what dawn is this.
β
β
Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)
β
Yellow? said Geryon. And he was thinking Yellow! Yellow! Even in dreams he doesnβt know me at all! Yellow!
β
β
Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)
β
76. David Hume β Treatise on Human Nature; Essays Moral and Political; An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
77. Jean-Jacques Rousseau β On the Origin of Inequality; On the Political Economy; Emile β or, On Education, The Social Contract
78. Laurence Sterne β Tristram Shandy; A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy
79. Adam Smith β The Theory of Moral Sentiments; The Wealth of Nations
80. Immanuel Kant β Critique of Pure Reason; Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals; Critique of Practical Reason; The Science of Right; Critique of Judgment; Perpetual Peace
81. Edward Gibbon β The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Autobiography
82. James Boswell β Journal; Life of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D.
83. Antoine Laurent Lavoisier β TraitΓ© ΓlΓ©mentaire de Chimie (Elements of Chemistry)
84. Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison β Federalist Papers
85. Jeremy Bentham β Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation; Theory of Fictions
86. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe β Faust; Poetry and Truth
87. Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier β Analytical Theory of Heat
88. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel β Phenomenology of Spirit; Philosophy of Right; Lectures on the Philosophy of History
89. William Wordsworth β Poems
90. Samuel Taylor Coleridge β Poems; Biographia Literaria
91. Jane Austen β Pride and Prejudice; Emma
92. Carl von Clausewitz β On War
93. Stendhal β The Red and the Black; The Charterhouse of Parma; On Love
94. Lord Byron β Don Juan
95. Arthur Schopenhauer β Studies in Pessimism
96. Michael Faraday β Chemical History of a Candle; Experimental Researches in Electricity
97. Charles Lyell β Principles of Geology
98. Auguste Comte β The Positive Philosophy
99. HonorΓ© de Balzac β PΓ¨re Goriot; Eugenie Grandet
100. Ralph Waldo Emerson β Representative Men; Essays; Journal
101. Nathaniel Hawthorne β The Scarlet Letter
102. Alexis de Tocqueville β Democracy in America
103. John Stuart Mill β A System of Logic; On Liberty; Representative Government; Utilitarianism; The Subjection of Women; Autobiography
104. Charles Darwin β The Origin of Species; The Descent of Man; Autobiography
105. Charles Dickens β Pickwick Papers; David Copperfield; Hard Times
106. Claude Bernard β Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine
107. Henry David Thoreau β Civil Disobedience; Walden
108. Karl Marx β Capital; Communist Manifesto
109. George Eliot β Adam Bede; Middlemarch
110. Herman Melville β Moby-Dick; Billy Budd
111. Fyodor Dostoevsky β Crime and Punishment; The Idiot; The Brothers Karamazov
112. Gustave Flaubert β Madame Bovary; Three Stories
113. Henrik Ibsen β Plays
114. Leo Tolstoy β War and Peace; Anna Karenina; What is Art?; Twenty-Three Tales
115. Mark Twain β The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; The Mysterious Stranger
116. William James β The Principles of Psychology; The Varieties of Religious Experience; Pragmatism; Essays in Radical Empiricism
117. Henry James β The American; The Ambassadors
118. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche β Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Beyond Good and Evil; The Genealogy of Morals;The Will to Power
119. Jules Henri PoincarΓ© β Science and Hypothesis; Science and Method
120. Sigmund Freud β The Interpretation of Dreams; Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis; Civilization and Its Discontents; New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
121. George Bernard Shaw β Plays and Prefaces
β
β
Mortimer J. Adler (How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading)
β
And for a moment the frailest leaves of life contained him in a widening happiness.
β
β
Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)
β
The instant of nature
forming between them drained every drop from the walls of ββhis life
leaving behind just ghosts
rustling like an old map.
β
β
Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)
β
These days Geryon was experiencing a pain not felt since childhood.
His wings were struggling. They tore against each other on his shoulders
like the little mindless red animals they were.
β
β
Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)
β
You remember I had a strong inclination all my life to be a painter. Under different circumstances I would rather have been a painter than to bother with these god-damn words. I never actually thought of myself as a poet but I knew I had to be an artist in some way.
β
β
William Carlos Williams (I Wanted to Write a Poem: The Autobiography of the Works of a Poet (New Directions Paperbook))
β
Ascent of the rapist up the stairs seems as slow as lava. She listens to the black space where his consciousness is, moving towards her.
β
β
Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)
β
Although a monster Geryon could be charming in company.
β
β
Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)
β
Clothes as text, clothes as narration, clothes as a story. Clothes as the story of our lives. And if you were to gather all the clothes you have ever owned in all your life, each baby shoe and winter coat and wedding dress, you would have your autobiography. You could wear, once more, your own life in all its stages, from whatever they wrapped you in when you emerged from the dark red naked warmth of the womb to your deathbed.
β
β
Linda Grant (The Thoughtful Dresser)
β
This was when Geryon liked to plan his autobiography; in that blurred state, between awake and asleep. When too many intake values are open in the soul, like the terrestrial crust of the earth.
β
β
Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)
β
Geryon was amazed at himself. He saw Herakles just about every day now.
The instant of nature
forming between them drained every drop from the walls of his life
leaving behind just ghosts
rustling like an old map. He had nothing to say to anyone. He felt loose and shiny.
He burned in the presence of his mother
I hardly know you anymore, she said leaning against the doorway of his room.
It had rained suddenly at suppertime,
now sunset was startling drops at the window. Stale peace of old bedtimes
filled the room. Love does not
make me gentle or kind, thought Geryon as he and his mother eyed each other
from opposite shores of the light
β
β
Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)
β
Golden eagles don`t mate with bald eagles, deer don`t mate with antelope, gray wolves don`t mate with red wolves. Just look at domesticated animals, at mongrel dogs, and mixed breed horses, and you`ll know the Great Mystery didn`t intend them to be that way. We weakened the species and introduced disease by mixing what should be kept seperate. Among humans, intermarriage weakens the respect people have for themselves and for their traditions. It undermines clarity of spirit and mind.
β
β
Russell Means (Where White Men Fear to Tread: The Autobiography of Russell Means)
β
Like the terrestrial crust of the earth / which is proportionately ten times thinner than an eggshell, the skin of the soul / is a miracle of mutual pressures.
β
β
Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)
β
He / thought of women. / What is it like to be a woman / listening in the dark? Black mantle of silence / stretches between them like geothermal pressure. / Ascent of the rapist up the stairs seems as slow as / lava. She listens / to the blank space where / his consciousness is, moving towards her. Lava can / move as slow as / nine hours per inch. [...] She wonders if / he is listening too. The cruel thing is, she falls asleep / listening.
β
β
Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)
β
Somehow Geryon made it to adolescence. Then he met Herakles and the kingdoms of his life all shifted down a few notches. ... Geryon was going into the Bus Depot one Friday night about three a.m. to get change to call home. Herakles stepped oof the bus from New Mexico and Geryon came fast around the corner of the platform and there it was one of those moments that is the opposite of blindness. The world poured back and forth between their eyes once or twice.
β
β
Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)
β
Geryon closed his eyes and listened to engines vibrating deep in the moon-splashed
canals of his brain.
β
β
Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)
β
A paste of blue cloud untangled itself on the red sky over the harbour.
β
β
Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)
β
A gust of night pushed its way in the door
and everyone inside wavered once like stalks in a field then resumed their talk.
β
β
Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)
β
He felt Herakles' hand move on his thigh and Geryon's head went back like a poppy in a breeze --
β
β
Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)
β
IN ONE OF his last psychoanalytic papers, D. W. Winnicott wrote: Fear of breakdown is the fear of a breakdown that has already been experienced.
β
β
Maggie Nelson (The Red Parts: Autobiography of a Trial)
β
After years of feeling like the dutiful daughter, now I just felt like a complete shit.
β
β
Maggie Nelson (The Red Parts: Autobiography of a Trial)
β
They were using her feinting body to erase their present and catapult themselves into a fantasy where sex-starved women lay submissive and split open like red, ripe watermelons.
β
β
Maya Angelou (Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas (Maya Angelou's Autobiography, #3))
β
May god favour you with dreams
β
β
Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)
β
AztΓ‘n megindult felΓ©jΓΌk az idΕ,
ahogy karjukkal egymΓ‘shoz simulva Γ‘lltak, arcukon a halhatatlansΓ‘g,
hΓ‘tukban az Γ©jszaka.
β
β
Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)
β
Would this day never end? His eye traveled to the clock at the front of the room and he fell into the pool of his favorite question.
β
β
Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)
β
Don't want to be free want to be with you.
β
β
Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)
β
and there it was one of those moments that is the opposite of blindness.
The world poured back and forth between their eyes once or twice.
β
β
Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)
β
Who can a monster blame for being red?
β
β
Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)
β
Most / of those he interviewed for the science project had to admit they did not hear the cries of the roses / being burned alive in the noonday sun. Like horses, Geryon would say helpfully, / like horses in war. No, they shook their heads./ Why is grass called blades? he asked them. Isnβt it because of the clicking? / They stared at him. You should be / interviewing roses not people, said the science teacher. Geryon liked this idea. / The last page of his project / was a photograph of his mother's rosebush under the kitchen window. / Four od the roses were on fire. / They stood up straight and pure on the stalk, gripping the dark like prophets / and howling colossal intimacies / from the back of their fused throats.
β
β
Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)
β
At what point does one say of a man that he has become unreal? He hugged his overcoat closer and tried to assemble in his mind Heideggerβs argument about the use of moods. We would think ourselves continuous with the world if we did not have moods. It is state-of-mind that discloses to us (Heidegger claims) that we are beings who have been thrown into something else.
β
β
Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)
β
I shared the novice aviary with three other drakes - a moss green by name of SeaTorrent, a brown called Darkling, and a red with a love of food named Majentrix. All were young, perhaps half my size, and afraid of me. Understandably so.
β
β
H. Leighton Dickson (Dragon of Ash & Stars: The Autobiography of a Night Dragon (The Dragons of Solunas #1))
β
It had rained suddenly at suppertime,
now sunset was startling drops at the window. Stale peace of old bedtimes
filled the room. Love does not
make me gentle or kind, thought Geryon as he and his mother eyed each other
from opposite shores of the light.
β
β
Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)
β
Do you have change for a dollar? Geryon heard Geryon say. No. Herakles stared straight at Geryon. But I'll give you a quarter for free. Why would you do that? I believe in being gracious. Some hours later they were down at the railroad tracks standing close together by the switch lights. The huge night moved overhead scattering drops of itself. You're cold, said Herakles suddenly, your hands are cold. Here. He put Geryon's hands inside his shirt.
β
β
Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)
β
Pass down an alley then turn a corner and there it is. Volcano in a wall.
Do you see that, says Ancash.
Beautiful, Herakles breathes out. He is looking at the men.
I mean the fire, says Ancash.
Herakles grins in the dark. Ancash watches the flames.
We are amazing beings, Geryon is thinking. We are neighbors of fire.
And now time is rushing towards them where they stand side by side with arms touching, immortality on their faces, night at their back.
β
β
Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)
β
How does distance look?' is a simple direct question. It extends from a spaceless within to the edge of what can be loved. It depends on light.
β
β
Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)
β
Fear of breakdown is the fear of a breakdown that has already been experienced.
β
β
Maggie Nelson (The Red Parts: Autobiography of a Trial)
β
How does distance look?" is a simple direct question. It extends from a spaceless
within to the edge
of what can be loved.
β
β
Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)
β
Up against another human being one's own procedures take on definition.
β
β
Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)
β
It happens to me frequently.
You disappear? Yes and then come back.
Moments of death I call them.
β
β
Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)
β
The huge night moved overhead
scattering drops of itself.
β
β
Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)
β
But when justice is done
the world drops away.
β
β
Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)
β
I am getting the bad feeling that my friends are growing tired of me. I am growing tired of me, too.
β
β
Maggie Nelson (The Red Parts: Autobiography of a Trial)
β
Geryon watched the top of Heraklesβ head and felt his limits returning. Nothing to say. Nothing.
β
β
Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)
β
ForrΓ³
volt a hang, mint egy szΓn belseje.
β
β
Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)
β
XII. WINGS Steps off a scraped March sky and sinks Up into the blind Atlantic morning One small Red dog jumping across the beach miles below Like a freed shadow
β
β
Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)
β
He picked his way carefully
toward the sex question. Why is it a question?
He understood
that people need
acts of attention from one another, does it
really matter which acts?
β
β
Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)
β
These were eye-opening years for me. When Iβd come back to Warner Brothers after the war, Iβd shared the orthodox liberal view that Communistsβif there really were anyβwere liberals who were temporarily off track, and whatever they were, they didnβt pose much of a threat to me or anyone. I heard whispers that Moscow wanted to infiltrate the worldβs most powerful medium of entertainment, but Iβd passed them off as irrational and emotional red baiting. Now I knew from firsthand experience how Communists used lies, deceit, violence, or any other tactic that suited them to advance the cause of Soviet expansionism. I knew from the experience of hand-to-hand combat that America faced no more insidious or evil threat than that of Communism.
β
β
Ronald Reagan (An American Life: The Autobiography)
β
I have heard that in the United States, people remember exactly what they were doing when planes hit the Twin Towers. In my country, too, we remember a plane crash that way. There is this difference: On September 11, nearly three thousand people died. In Rwanda, smaller in size and population than Ohio, the number was three times that many, every day, for a hundred days.
β
β
Denise Uwimana (From Red Earth: A Rwandan Story of Healing and Forgiveness)
β
It is a black-and-white photograph showing a naked young man in fetal position.
He has entitled it "No Tail!"
The fantastic fingerwork of his wings is outspread on the bed like a black lace map of South America.
β
β
Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)
β
We used to have a family game, invented by my sister and a friend of hers - it was called 'Agatha's Husbands'. The idea was that they picked out two or at the most three of the most repellent looking strangers in a room, and it was then put to me that i had to choose one of them as a husband, on pain of death or slow torture by the Chinese.
'now then, Agatha, which will you have - the fat young one with pimples, and the scurfy head, or that black one like a gorilla with the bulging eyes?'
'Oh I can't - they're so awful.'
'You must - it's got to be one of them. Or else red hot needles and water torture.'
'Oh dear, then the gorilla.
β
β
Agatha Christie (Agatha Christie: An Autobiography)
β
In Berkeley and San Francisco, the revolution didn't seem to far away. A lot of white radicals, hippies, Chicanos, Blacks, and Asians were ready to get down. But i hadn't forgotten the hard hats and the red necks and the bible belt and the so called middle amerikans who had elected Nixon. I couldn't imagine how the "new left" was talking to those people, much less organizing and changing their minds. I decided the only way i would come up with answers was to on keep studying and struggling. I didn't know how half of what i was studying would fit in but i figured it would all come in handy some day. I read about guerrilla warfare and clandestine struggle without having the faintest idea that one day i would go underground. It's kind of funny when i think about it because reading that stuff had probably saved my life a million times.
β
β
Assata Shakur (Assata: An Autobiography)
β
Water! Out from between two crouching masses of the world the word leapt. ββββ It was raining on his face. He forgot for a moment that he was a brokenheart then he remembered. Sick lurch downward to Geryon trapped in his own bad apple. Each morning a shock to return to the cut soul.
β
β
Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)
β
A fast note about Ice-T's autobiography: There's a section where he tells a story about hanging out with Flavor Flav that involves going to Red Lobster in a Ferrari. I suspect the phrase "going to Red Lobster in a Ferrari" is the most accurate description of Flavor Flav anyone will ever come up with.
β
β
Shea Serrano (The Rap Year Book: The Most Important Rap Song From Every Year Since 1979, Discussed, Debated, and Deconstructed)
β
Three ancient musicians hunched thereβ piano, guitar, accordion. None of them looked less than seventy years old, the accordion player so frail each time he swayed his shoulders around a corner of the melody Geryon feared the accordion would crush him flat. It gradually became clear that nothing could crush this man. Hardly glancing at one another the three of them played as one person, in a state of pure discovery. They tore clear and clicked and locked and unlocked, they shot their eyebrows up and down. They leaned together and wove apart, they rose and cut away and stalked one another and flew up in a cloud and sank back down on waves.
β
β
Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)
β
I wanted an imagination that would inhabit a world of fact, descend like a shining light upon the ordinary life of Eden Street, and not force me to exist in an "elsewhere". I wanted the light to shine upon the pigeons of Grey Street, the plum trees in our garden, the two japonica bushes (one red, one yellow), our pine plantations and gully, our summer house, our lives, and our home, the world of Oamaru, the kingdom by the sea. I refused to accept that if I were to fulfil my secret ambition to be a poet, I should spend my imaginative life among the nightingales instead of among the wax-eyes and the fantails. I wanted my life to be the "other world".
β
β
Janet Frame (To the Is-land: An Autobiography (Autobiography, #1))
β
There were glamorous young men with dyed hair who rustled like old cellophane. Older men had airs of sophistication and cold grace, giving the impression that if they were not so terribly tired they would go to places (known only to a select few) where the conversation was more scintillating and the congregation more interesting.
There were young women who had the exotic sheen of recently fed forest animals. Although they moved their fine heads languorously this way and that, nothing in the room excited their appetites. Unfashionable red lips cut across their white faces, and the crimson fingernails, as pointed as surgical instruments, heightened the predatory effect. Older, sadder women were more interesting to me. Voluminous skirts and imported shawls did not hide their heavy bodies, nor was their unattractiveness shielded by the clanks of chains and ribbons of beads, or by pale pink lips and heavily drawn doe eyes. Their presence among the pretty people enchanted me. It was like seeing frogs buzzed by iridescent dragonflies.
β
β
Maya Angelou (Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas (Maya Angelou's Autobiography, #3))
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And even in the open air the stench of whiskey was appalling. To this fiendish poison, I am certain, the greater part of the squalor I saw is due. Many of these vermin were obviously not foreignersβI counted at least five American countenances in which a certain vanished decency half showed through the red whiskey bloating. Then I reflected upon the power of wine, and marveled how self-respecting persons can imbibe such stuff, or permit it to be served upon their tables. It is the deadliest enemy with which humanity is faced. Not all the European wars could produce a tenth of the havock occasioned among men by the wretched fluid which responsible governments allow to be sold openly. Looking upon that mob of sodden brutes, my mindβs eye pictured a scene of different kind; a table bedecked with spotless linen and glistening silver, surrounded by gentlemen immaculate in evening attireβand in the reddening faces of those gentlemen I could trace the same lines which appeared in full development of the beasts of the crowd. Truly, the effects of liquor are universal, and the shamelessness of man unbounded. How can reform be wrought in the crowd, when supposedly respectable boards groan beneath the goblets of rare old vintages? Is mankind asleep, that its enemy is thus entertained as a bosom friend? But a week or two ago, at a parade held in honour of the returning Rhode Island National Guard, the Chief Executive of this State, Mr. Robert Livingston Beeckman, prominent in New York, Newport, and Providence society, appeared in such an intoxicated condition that he could scarce guide his mount, or retain his seat in the saddle, and he the guardian of the liberties and interests of that Colony carved by the faith, hope, and labour of Roger Williams from the wilderness of savage New-England! I am perhaps an extremist on the subject of prohibition, but I can see no justification whatsoever for the tolerance of such a degrading demon as drink.
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H.P. Lovecraft (Lord of a Visible World: An Autobiography in Letters)
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For the flip side of the record, we preformed yet another Dragnet parody, "Little Blue Riding Hood." The announcer, Hy Averback, explained that the color had been changed to prevent an investigation. Those were the McCarthy witch-hunting days and no one wanted to get caught being "Red." So of course, I was Little Blue Riding Hood with a sweet gentle little voice different from the maiden who was almost devoured by the dragon. I was also Grandma.
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June Foray (Did You Grow Up with Me, Too?: The Autobiography of June Foray)
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Reservations should not have been a permeant home. Like trailers, like campgrounds, like prisons or hospitals, they felt temporary, like some place you go between places. I realized I wasn't sure what permanence looked like, because we weren't meant to survive. My family, my tribe, my ancestors, we were something temporary to the settlers. Something that would eventually go away. Whether by disease or alcohol or poverty, our genocide was inevitable to them. I looked at the smoke pluming from the metal chimneys of the small reservation houses along the highway. But here we were, existing in our impermanent homes.
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Sasha taqwsΜΙblu LaPointe (Red Paint: The Ancestral Autobiography of a Coast Salish Punk)
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AT THE VOIR dire the judge asks all the potential jurors to swear that even if they regularly watch CSI, Law & Order, Cold Case Files, or any other television show featuring forensic science and criminal justice, that they have a firm grasp on the difference between televisionβeven reality televisionβand reality itself, in which we are presumably now mired. One potential juror with several small children says that wonβt be a problem for her, because she mostly watches the Cartoon Network; the judge quips that an afternoon spent with the Cartoon Network provides as much or more information about the criminal justice system as a full season of Law & Order.
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Maggie Nelson (The Red Parts: Autobiography of a Trial)
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Once upon a time I'd left Los Angeles and been swallowed down the throat of a life in which my sole loyalty was to my tongue. My belly. Myself. My mother called me selfish and so selfish I became. From nineteen to twenty-five I was a mouth, sating. For myself I made three-day braises and chose the most marbled meats, I played loose with butter and cream. My arteries were young, my life pooling before me, and I lapped, luxurious, from it. I drank, smoked, flew cheap red-eyes around Europe, I lived in thrilling shitholes, I found pills that made nights pass in a blink or expanded time to a soap bubble, floating, luminous, warm. Time seemed infinite, then. I begged famous chefs for the chance to learn from them. I entered competitions and placed in a few. I volunteered to work brunch, turn artichokes, clean the grease trap. I flung my body at all of it: the smoke and singe of the grill station, a duck's breast split open like a geode, two hundred oysters shucked in the walk-in, sex in the walk-in, drunken rides around Paris on a rickety motorcycle and no helmet, a white truffle I stole and shaved in secret over a bowl of Kraft mac n' cheese for me, just me, as my body strummed the high taut selfish song of youth. On my twenty-fifth birthday I served black-market fugu to my guests, the neurotoxin stinging sweetly on my lips as I waited to see if I would, by eating, die. At that age I believed I knew what death was: a thrill, like brushing by a friend who might become a lover.
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C Pam Zhang (Land of Milk and Honey)