Lynda Barry Quotes

Dear Anyone Who Finds This, Do not blame the drugs.

We don’t create a fantasy world to escape reality, we create it to be able to stay.

No matter what, expect the unexpected. And whenever possible BE the unexpected.

Love is an exploding cigar we willingly smoke.

You have to be willing to spend time making things for no known reason.

There are certain children who are told they are too sensitive, and there are certain adults who believe sensitivity is a problem that can be fixed in the way that crooked teeth can be fixed and made straight. And when these two come together you get a fairytale, a kind of story with hopelessness in it. I believe there is something in these old stories that does what singing does to words. They have transformational capabilities, in the way melody can transform mood. They can't transform your actual situation, but they can transform your experience of it. We don't create a fantasy world to escape reality, we create it to be able to stay. I believe we have always done this, used images to stand and understand what otherwise would be intolerable.

This ability to exist in pieces is what some adults call resilience. And I suppose in some way it is a kind of resilience, a horrible resilience that makes adults believe children forget trauma.

What year is it in your imagination?

You may be a lady but you are still the man!

It is true that I am a person with black pockets of evil and hatred in my heart. There are underground places inside of me

When we finish a book, why do we hold it in both hands and gaze at it as if it were somehow alive?

The thing I call ‘my mind’ seems to be kind of like a landlord that doesn’t really know its tenants.

The groove is so mysterious. We're born with it and we lose it and the world seems to split apart before our eyes into stupid and cool. When we get it back, the world unifies around us, and both stupid and cool fall away. I am grateful to those who are keepers of the groove. The babies and the grandmas who hang on to it and help us remember when we forget that any kind of dancing is better than no dancing at all.

At the center of everything we call 'the arts,' and children call 'play,' is something which seems somehow alive.

But when the thing that is scaring you is already Jesus, who are you supposed to pray to?

If it is your time, love will track you down like a cruise missile.If you say "No! I don't want it right now," that's when you'll get it for sure. Love will make a way out of no way. Love is an exploding cigar which we willingly smoke.

what is an imaginary friend? are there also imaginary enemies?

If I could only turn the etch-a-sketch of my life upside down.

What is an idea made of? Of future, past and also meanwhile.

A man who has been dead for a week in a hot trailer looks more like a man than you would first expect.

Flies die in so many lonely places. -Roberta Rohbeson

Ask a burning question, get a burning answer

Twinkle twinkle little star. You are nothing. You've been dead for a thousand years...

i believe [images] are the soul's immune system and transit system.

He's picked clean! Eaten by cats!

I am hell with a knife and there is nothing I can really do about it but try and keep my mouth shut and try not to let it show.

are memories pictures or the secret doorway?

but paper and ink have conjuring abilities of their own. arrangements of lines and shapes, of letters and words on a series of pages make a world we can dwell and travel in.

One by one most kids I knew quit drawing and never drew again. It left behind too much evidence.

Something can only become an illusion after disillusionment. Before that, it is something real.

You keep seeing your picture on posters that you are missing but you're not. That'd be weird, right? Or say you look down at the sidewalk and earthworms are spelling your name. Or you open a peanut bag and the 'hello' is written in your writing on the inside of the shell. Would that weird ya?

The phone gives us a lot but it takes away three key elements of discovery: loneliness, uncertainty, and boredom. Those have always been where creative ideas come from.” —Lynda Barry

something can only become an illusion after disillusionment. before that, it is something real. what caused the disillusionment? no one told me the print on the wall was just ink and paper and had no life of its own. at some point the cat stopped blinking, and i stopped thinking it could.

And I could tell she loved him. And although she was an evil fungus growing on 200 pounds of irritated lard, her feelings were real.

Same circus, different clowns, and without a doubt I'm one of them.

The histories of vampires and people are not so different, really. How many of us can honestly see our own reflection?

What is it? The ordinary is EXTRAORDINARY. The ordinary is extraordinary. The ordinary is the thing we want back when someone we love dies. When someone dies or leaves or falls out of love with us. We call it "little things". We say, "it's the little things I miss most." The ordinary things. It's the little thing that brings them back to us unexpectedly. We say "reminds us" but it is more than reminding-it's a conflagration-it's an inundation-Both fire and flood is memory. It's spark and breach so ordinary we do not question it. The atom split. The little thing.

i didn't know there were different lines of aliveness, and two worlds contained by each other.

In health we're doing the digestive system. We each got assigned a topic for an oral report. I got the small intestine. I swear to god I hate my life.

Mr. Harmong is the cheapest chinztiest most pig-lipped tightwad skanked-out lardo king landlord of all time.

As I enter the small intestine I get squeezed by muscles. Its dark and the walls look like slimey crushed velvet theres pancreas juice on me help me I am disintigrating.

You may be a lady but your are still the man!

Then how can you ever know about the beautiful goodness of Mud? How bad it wants to be things. How bad it wants to get on your legs and arms and take your footprints and handprints and how bad it wants you to make it alive! Mud is always ready to play with you. Seriously you should try it!

The radio was on and that was the first time I heard that song, the one I hate. Whenever I hear it all I can think of is that very day riding in the front seat with Lucy leaning against me and the smell of Juicy Fruit making me want to throw up. How can a song do that? Be like a net that catches a whole entire day, even a day whose guts you hate? You hear it and all of a sudden everything comes hanging back in front of you, all tangled up in that music.

Maybonne said "Just because someone has lace-up hip huggers does not mean they can control the world". Then Magreet let her wear those pants. When my aunt saw them on her she shouted "Are you trying to kill me?!

Social reality is an incredible gift. You can simply make stuff up, like a meme or a tradition or a law, and if other people treat it as real, it becomes real. Our social world is a buffer we build around the physical world. The author Lynda Barry writes, “We don’t create a fantasy world to escape reality. We create it to be able to stay.

The thing i call 'my mind' seems to be kind of like a landlord that doesn't really know its tenants.

Mr. Harmong is the cheapest chintziest most pig-lipped tightwad skanked-out lardo king landlord of all time.

Non-photo blue pencils... After about a week of using them the class is smitten. It looks like thinking, this color of blue. Like words before you say them.

What if she stepped on a needle and it went right into her foot and Roberta would not feel it and the needle would rise and rise and rise through the veins leading up to the heart and then the needle would STAB HER IN THE HEART and Roberta would DIE and it would be VERY PAINFUL this according to nurse mother a medical expert on Freaky Ways to Croak... The mother shouted that she knew several people who died from the Rising Stab of the Unfelt Needle or RSUN she has seen cases of it many times and not ONE PERSON HAS SURVIVED IT.

On my honor I will do my best to do my duty to god and my country but it might not be the same god as the god of the church and I might not be digging on the message of the president because the windmills of his mind are cracked on a lot of subjects concerning people.

once i knew the blinking cat could not really blink, was just paper and ink.

The future is fixed. The past ever-changing

In the night when the moon is large, the world spreads blue in every direction.

Like say if the mom and dad of god said he could never get dirty. There would be no world!

No, she answered, “one is of tin, and one of straw; one is a girl and another a Lion. None of them is fit to work, so you may tear them into small pieces.

Some lights shine without any flashing. Others flash on and off.

How old do you have to be to make a bad drawing?

There's the drawing you are trying to make and the drawing that s actually being made- and you can't see it until you forget what you were trying to do.

Dear Blubbo, How is it going? It is fine here. My sisters are fine. Mom is usual. Everything is regular in life except I am still seeing the burning skull heads. Yesterday Mom took me to Sears for school clothes. I told my sisters I could see the people's head bones. They said DO NOT tell Mom. A guy moved a trailer onto the empty lot by our house. His skull is spectacular, many colors glowing.

I kept trying to find a way to turn myself so that I couldn't see the telephone poles or be in the path of father's breath. I was feeling dizzy and then very sick and the father was shouting, 'WHAT THE--GO TO THE HEAD, DO IT IN THE HEAD! DON'T PUKE ON ME, CLYDE! CLYDE!' I never did finish my letter to Jesus. I tried for a while but I couldn't think of anything else to say besides, Have a Good Summer and Stay Crazy.

Above me soft footsteps, the sound through the ceiling of a teenager haunted by a door to the night. My cousin Maybonne lights up a Salem, blows ghosts to the darkness, be it ever so humble, there's no place like home.

In a classroom of students with varying levels of drawing experience, this way of drawing brings us to a common starting place that is like the starting place we all share: our first drawings of people made when we were little.

In the digital age, don’t forget to use your digits!

I believe they [images] are the soul's immune system....

To follow a wandering mind means having to get lost. Can you stand being lost?

[Lynda's mother] You're stupid and you don't know it, that's you're problem. You talk, talk, talk, all the time. No one wants to listen to an idiot. [Young Lynda] Uh. OK. Thanks, Mom.

They sky was streaked with the marks of sundown. A jet trail glowed in the ugliest pink. My eyes felt raw. The Windowpane had twisted time so badly. The day had seemed a minute long but in that minute my life uncoiled.

Daily practice with images both written and drawn is rare once we have lost our baby teething begin to think of ourselves as good at some things and bad at other things. It is not that this isn’t true, but the side-effects are profound once we abandon a certain activity like drawing because we are bad at it. A certain state of mind- (what McGilchrist might call “attention”) is also lost. A certain capacity of the mind is shuttered, and for most people, it stays that way for life. It is a bad trade.

The cool thing about being a middle-aged woman is that they asked me if I wanted the security guard inside of the room or outside of the room, and I said, “Outside.” And the guard said, “You’ll be locked in, there’ll be no way for you to get out.” And I turned around and there was 21 guys looking at me. There’s something about being a middle-aged woman that just totally… I can rock the Auntie Lynda or grandma thing now. [Impersonating an old woman] “Now, you sit down! I don’t care about those tattoos! You just sit down.” [Laughter.] I really loved it. These are the people that I would venture to say probably went to public schools, probably went to difficult public schools, and now they’re in prison. Their ability to focus and write these stories was amazing; I mean their stories are.… I think the same thing that can get somebody in prison is the same thing that could make them a really good writer. Impulse control. There’s no, “Is this a bad convenience store to rob?” [Laughter.] “Is this a bad sentence?

I always start my class with a coloring assignment using crayons to color three pages from a variety of coloring pages pinned to the wall. Pick 3. Color them densely, trying to get as much of the crayon on the paper as possible. Students find it frustrating because crayons are surprisingly hard to work with, but they usually have some fun doing it. Until...when the finished pages were pinned to the wall, all of the pages were colored just the way I assigned— but all the joy was gone. Something went wrong. What was it? This: I told them to color hard in order to do it right. And go straight to using force— thinking I was showing them a short-cut—— this took away the way of coloring they would have found on their own. By telling them just how to do it, I took the playing-around away, the gradual figuring out that brings something alive to this activity, makes it worth-while, and is transferable to other activities. I realize now the best results came when I gave no instructions except, “spend time on this assignment.” That was 3 years ago. Why did it take me so long to figure this out?

I stared out the window and watched the land change like it had a mental illness. Dead and barren became spinach, chard and cabbage glittering with the pulsing spray from long-wheeled irrigators, and then a dead stockyard with knocked down fence posts and a collapsed ramp and then a dumping ground for junk cars and raw garbage with turkey buzzards circling overhead and then sudden low orchards, peaches it looked like, with migrants reaching into scraggly trees with dirty pick-sacks slung over their shoulders. And then it was barren again, looking quite scorched, and then we arrived.

It takes about two or three minutes to make a scribble monster. It takes years to put two and two together. What if your monsters had something to offer you? An unsuspected something? At some point this monster got out of someone's pen, got out of hand, but here he is again, after being thrown away. In the bin, then out of the bin, and homeless, then in a halfway house you didn't even know existed, though it was right around the corner, literally a ten minute walk from your door, your uncle died there. Have mercy on the unspeakable monster who has no other way to tell you it's you.

Playing and fun are not the same thing, though when we grow up we may forget that and find ourselves mixing up playing with happiness. There can be a kind of amnesia about the seriousness of playing, especially when we played by ourselves or looked like we were playing by ourselves. I believe a kid who is playing is not alone. There is something brought alive during play, and this something, when played, seems to play back. If playing isn't happiness or fun, if it is something which may lead to those things or to something else entirely, not being able to play is a misery. No one stopped me from playing when I was alone, but there were times when I wasn't able to, though I wanted to--there were times when nothing played back. Writers call it 'writer's block'. For kids there are other names for that feeling, though kids don't usually know them. Fairy tales and myths are often about this very thing. They begin sometimes with this very situation: a dead kingdom. Its residents all turned to stone. It's a good way to say it, that something alive is gone. The television eased the problem by presenting channels to an ever-lively world I could watch, though it couldn't watch me back, not that it would see much if it could. A girl made of stone facing a flickering light, 45 years later a woman made of stone doing the same thing. In a myth or a fairy tale one doesn't restore the kingdom by passivity, nor can it be done by force. It can't be done by logic or thought. It can't be done by logic or thought. So how can it be done? Monsters and dangerous tasks seem to be part of it. Courage and terror and failure or what seems like failure, and then hopelessness and the approach of death convincingly. The happy ending is hardly important, though we may be glad it's there. The real joy is knowing that if you felt the trouble in the story, your kingdom isn't dead.

We crossed a wide river and then everything changed. There were no more fields, no houses, no trees, not even telephone poles. Even the colours were gone, all of them except brown and grey and blue of the late-afternoon sky. The world got emptier and emptier until it looked like a brown ocean of dead velvet, just emptiness covered with short dry grass and low scrub.

In the days of Rohbeson’s Slaughterhouse, flies were everywhere, crawling up the walls like living designs. I used to fall asleep looking at them. Thinking about their world. Their society. Did they have kings? Did they steal from each other? My light fixture was black-full with bodies of them. I used to think they had feelings about certain people. People who noticed them. Certain people. Me.

It’s hard for me to read Weirdo and a lot of those magazines; it’s always depressing for me to read these guys writing about how they’re so depressed and they can’t get laid. After a while, it really gets on my nerves. There’s something about it that makes me think it’s just this club of really fucked-up dudes [laughs] — Weirdo especially — and after a while, I just didn’t want to read it any more. I was not interested in that viewpoint; it just made me feel bad and made me feel that these were people I didn’t ever want to know.

I am someone who can look at certain things without flinching. Certain dead people. Particular dead people. But I cannot look at the creatures.

They sky was streaked with the marks of sundown. A jet trail glowed in the ugliest pink. My eyes felt raw. The Windowpane had twisted time so badly. The had seemed a minute long but in that minute my life uncoiled.

The time for it is always with us though we say I do not have that kind of time. The kind of time I have is not for this but for that. I wish I had that kind of time.

[Chucky] Ya peanut headed suckerfool! Take me on! Ya ugly knuckle butted dogface underpants! You think I'm playin'?

The ability to exist in pieces is what some adults call resilience. And I suppose in some way it is a kind of resilience, a horrible resilience that makes adults believe children forget trauma.

I became a teenager when I discovered how to give myself that feeling of wholeness, even if it lasted only for a moment even if it got me into huge trouble, it was the closest i could come to... to.. i don't remember.

Or we might draw dried flowers—still wrong-handed and quick—if we have them. Which makes us all commonly flustered and silly (and usually really gets us laughing). We might then exchange those drawings with a partner who will add captions, making a kind of lyric comic book, which makes us now collaborating (though listening to each other’s dreams and talking about what we love is collaboration as well, maybe even radical collaboration). This seems like something I probably got from Lynda Barry. There is a lot, so so much, to get from Lynda Barry.

Some people say they can't remember their childhoods at all. That early morning when they waited for others, bouncing the ball and watching its shadow, is lost to them. The ant hills on the sidewalk cracks, the grasshopper that fell in the storm drain, the ball too deep in the stickerbushes to ever be recovered, a morning spent waiting. What reason would we have for remembering any of it? Yet when we do, there is always a feeling of surprise and amazement over this little bit of lost world. Who knows which moments make us who we are? Some of them? All of them? The ones we never really thought of as anything special? How many kickball games did I play? And what would I give to have just one more ups. What would I give to see them all again. Chuckie, roll the ball this way. Chuckie, roll me a good one.

Some nights looking at him scares me so bad I can hardly move and I start doing a prayer for protection. But when the thing that is scaring you is already Jesus, who are you supposed to pray to?

Well one thing that they never tell you in grade school is to enjoy singing while you can because eventually you are going to divided up by who can sing and who can't sing, and the people who can sing will go to Choir, and the ones who can't sing won't sing, and may never sing again, and go to the class called "Music Appreciation.

Do you ever wonder what is music? Who invented it and what for and all that? And why hearing a certain song can make a whole entire time of your life suddenly just rise up and stick in your brain?