Fanny Howe Quotes

Why does a heart wear its eyes into hell like slivers of false sunshine

The wildness of the flower is all in the tone

The ring comes whenever it will because it's dark where the mountains mother and being stuck in one spot is something to ring bells about

I can't rescue what never happened though I came here to do so.

Usually plot is to fiction what form is to poetry. It lifts and fills the rambling language and presses it down into a single shape and sound. (85)

We have often had this particular exchange about climate and landscape and why we both feel so lonely here uprooted. It was what each of us had wanted of course. Besides wanting to experience a place we hated, we wanted to be insomniacs and loners, losers and drop-outs. To know the sky was the only location of meaning and joy left to us.

There is no longer any class outside the class of character, and no history to put your faith in. You can actually live as if you have no culture, no perspective particular to a date in time. You are an individual whose prime and solitary property is your own body. Dying becomes a hell beyond all reason or justice in this ahistorical context.

(Sometimes I think prostitution and slavery may be the actual subjects of all fiction because of the way fiction exploits its characters.)

According to a Kabbalistic rabbi, in the Messianic age people will no longer quarrel with others but only with themselves.

The point of art is to show people that life is worth living by showing that it isn’t

Since love came over and knocked me down, Then kicked me in the side and fled, I have suffered from a prolonged perplexity. God is the object of my wonder and the closest to me. Especially near sleep. My sheets are like the wings of a guardian angel. There is no other fabric so near to my feelings.

A signal does not necessarily mean that you want to be located or described. It can mean that you want to be known as Unlocatable and Hidden.

Philosophy should only be written as poetry.

Walk to developmental old trombone- I - seeking to be found- inside time!- by one whose blues seek by speaking tunes to this specific city afternoon of bread, fumes, and orange nasturtiums- am, still, solo- even the base of me being, unknown.

And after that loneliness will accompany you to every airport, train station, bus depot, café, cinema, and onto airplanes and into cars, strange rooms and offices, classrooms and libraries, and it will hang near your hand like a habit. But it isn’t a habit and no one can see it. It’s your obligation, and your companion warms itself against you. You are faithful to it because it was the only vow you made finally, when it was unnecessary. If you figured out why you chose it, years later, would you ask it to go? How would you replace it?

I traveled to the page where scripture meets fiction. The paper slept but the night in me woke up. Black letters were now alive and collectible in a material crawl. I could not decipher their intentions anymore. To what end did their shapes come forth? To seduce or speak truth?

First you might cry. Because shame and loneliness are almost one. Shame at existing in the first place. Shame at being visible, taking up space, breathing some of the sky, sleeping in a whole bed, asking for a share. Loneliness feels so much like shame, it always seems to need a little more time on its own.

Angels die? It’s a frightening-miracle because here they are. The Upper God has let them drop like centuries into space. And I recognize them!

I was hungry for love It was pathetic the stones I threw or smashed my mouth on in my pathology of starvation

That’s what the twentieth century was, a kind of windstorm-scouring of all we thought was knowledge, and truth, and ours—until it became too strong for us, or we too weak for it, and “the self replaced the soul as the fist of survival” (Fanny Howe).

A body's interior is a serpent studded with corruption. From the will of each person-to secret egos- she sees a net, dot-to-dot, interconnected, with persons bent over it, laborious, intent, the whole world working together on one collective project. When your mouth remembers a bit of bread left on a plate and leads you back to finish it, you are having the experience- close to the surface- by which you usually live.

The operative word in these lines from D.H. Lawrence, who wasn’t a conventionally religious person, is “soul.” It’s a word that has become almost embarrassing for many contemporary people unless it is completely stripped of its religious meaning. Perhaps that’s just what it needs sometimes: to be stripped of its “religious” meaning, in the sense that faith itself sometimes needs to be stripped of its social and historical encrustations and returned to its first, churchless incarnation in the human heart. That’s what the twentieth century was, a kind of windstorm-scouring of all we thought was knowledge, and truth, and ours - until it became too strong for us, or we too weak for it, and “the self replaced the soul as the first of survival” (Fanny Howe). Anxiety comes from the self as ultimate concern, from the fact that the self cannot bear this ultimate concern: it buckles and wavers under the strain, and eventually, inevitability, it breaks.