Bliss Montage Quotes

A boy, at best, can adore his mother, but a girl can understand her. When the doctor told me it was a girl, I thought, Now I will be understood.

It doesn’t take much to come into your own; all it takes is someone’s gaze. It’s not totally accurate to say that I felt seen. It was more that: Beheld by her, I learned how to become myself. Her interest actualized me.

It is in the most surreal situations that a person feels the most present, the closest to reality.

To live is to exist within time. To remember is to negate time.

It doesn't take much to convince yourself that you're doing okay, just some discretionary income and a regularity to your days.

Because people change. Feelings can be temporary and fickle. That’s why it’s important to anchor intent to something serious, extravagant.

A woman sat alone at her dining table, reading and drinking a cocktail. It’d be such a relief to be older already, unburdened by the pressure to leverage your ever-fleeting beauty for whatever.

It doesn't take much to come into your own; all it takes is someone's gaze.

Another self was needed to move into the future.

Her family would only wound her, nothing more, so that she went through this life maimed, but still she went through life.

Humans are animals too, are they not? When an animal is sick, it goes alone by itself to find a quiet place in the woods and rests, for days, for weeks. Sometimes it cannot overcome its illness, but many times it can. The resting, the quiet, and being alone is enough. This is the way of nature. Nature corrects itself.

What if I dissected my feelings, pulled them apart and brutalized them so that he would know they were true? Is this enough? I'd ask. How about this? They would explode and drip over everything like bodily fluids and finally he'd be forced to look away.

I really, really want to catch him. I want to masticate him with my teeth. I want to barf on him and coat him in my stinging acids. I want to unleash a million babies inside him and burden him with their upbringing.

Whatever I felt, whatever this feeling was inside of me, there is no place for it. There is no place for it to go, and I would have to carry it around inside of me for a long time, so long that it would fossilize and become a part of me.

Maybe you don't know that you're wounded until you receive the salve. The salve that makes everything come back.

When you play stupid games, you win stupid prizes.

On the other side of graduation was her actual life, the slow narrowing of possibilities that would catch her and freeze her in a vocation, a relationship, a life. She intended to avoid that slow calcification for as long as possible—if only by refraining from making any crucial choices. In other words, she was moving back home.

As her aunt stroked her forehead, she thought that, yes, finally she understood what a homecoming was supposed to be. It was to be comfortable in a way you couldn't be elsewhere. It was to be mothered into an oblivious ooze.

Especially the deep, post-holiday extremes of January and February, when, no longer buoyed by festivities and merriments, you’re confronted with the empty expanse of a new year, discarded resolutions in your wake, resigned to your own inability to change.

It was a time when the future could have been anything, been anywhere. It was so open that it could actually crush her.

Everyone expected to die in debt, and had learned not to mind. It was just a fact of living in a country on the decline.

Oh my god, I lard you so much, he said from across the table, through a mouthful of cookies. Lol, I said.

What if I dissected my feelings, pulled them apart and brutalized them so that he would know they were true? Is this enough? I’d ask. How about this?

All winter long, I had glimpsed his deeply set habits, his regimented schedule. When I left, he would eat a dinner of leftovers, then continue to work until sleep. Everything revolved, to a fault, around work, around his next book project. If I had lived alone, I would have turned out the same way. It is the thing I have been most afraid of happening, my strictness toward myself calcifying into a lifestyle, my traits ingrown so deeply that my oddness surfaces, apparent to all.

In sex, in towel wringing, in dishwashing, as in everything else, he was exactly himself. If being exactly yourself meant you had to suffer the loneliness of being unlike anyone else, he seemed not to mind. The insularity of his lifestyle cradled him.

How grateful I was to fate for having subjected me to the ordeal of learning an oriental language, opening before me that strange way of thinking and teaching me word pictography. It was precisely this “unusual” way of thinking that later helped me to master the nature of montage, and still later, when I came to recognize this “unusual,” “emotional” way of thinking, different from our common “logical” way, this helped me to comprehend the most recondite in the methods of art. But of this later. Thus my first infatuation proved to be my first true-love. But this true-love was not all bliss; it was not only tempestuous, it was tragic.

It is the thing I have been most afraid of happening, my strictness toward myself calcifying into a lifestyle, my traits ingrown so deeply that my oddness surfaces, apparent to all. What I was afraid of in myself, I liked in Y.

During the years I lived alone, even in my self-imposed solitude there had been a part of myself I was afraid of. I worked too much, as if it were the only thing, to diminishing returns. Left to my own devices, there was a streak of masochism in my single-minded, obsessive habits. I didn't exercise that much, but when I did, it was in gruesome marathons of overexertion. I didn't eat enough, and when I did, it was in wild, sobering feasts, remembering that I even had a body. I made myself sick. Unregulated, I would have eventually destroyed myself. Yet even knowing this didn't motivate me to change my ways.

They were the type of family that camouflaged their wealth in outdoor apparel and camping gear.

On the TV, the newscaster kept referring to the imperialists, as translated in the closed captions. During her time here, she had learned that the term was virtually synonymous with Americans.