The Madness Vase Quotes

The trauma said, ‘Don’t write these poems. Nobody wants to hear you cry about the grief inside your bones.

My mouth is a fire escape. The words coming out don’t care that they are naked. There is something burning in there.

Remind me that the most fertile lands were built by the fires of volcanoes.

The nutritionist said I should eat root vegetables. Said if I could get down thirteen turnips a day I would be grounded, rooted. Said my head would not keep flying away to where the darkness lives. The psychic told me my heart carries too much weight. Said for twenty dollars she’d tell me what to do. I handed her the twenty. She said, “Stop worrying, darling. You will find a good man soon.” The first psycho therapist told me to spend three hours each day sitting in a dark closet with my eyes closed and ears plugged. I tried it once but couldn’t stop thinking about how gay it was to be sitting in the closet. The yogi told me to stretch everything but the truth. Said to focus on the out breath. Said everyone finds happiness when they care more about what they give than what they get. The pharmacist said, “Lexapro, Lamicatl, Lithium, Xanax.” The doctor said an anti-psychotic might help me forget what the trauma said. The trauma said, “Don’t write these poems. Nobody wants to hear you cry about the grief inside your bones.” But my bones said, “Tyler Clementi jumped from the George Washington Bridge into the Hudson River convinced he was entirely alone.” My bones said, “Write the poems.

I wish for a heart you can see straight through, for a voice that glows in the dark, and a few really good friends to say, “That’s the way to go.

Love isn't always magic. But if I offered my body to the magician, if I told him to cut me in half so after that I could come to you whole and ask for you back would you listen for this dark alley love song? For the winter we heated our home from the steam off our own bodies?

We were the letters sent to the wrong address, but opened anyway.

..when a war ends, what does that look like exactly? do the cells in the body stop detonating themselves? does the orphanage stop screaming for its mother? when the sand in the desert has been melted down to glass and our reflection is not something we can stand to look at does the white flag make for a perfect blindfold? yesterday i was told a story about this little girl in Iraq, six-years-old, who cannot fall asleep because when she does she dreams of nothing but the day she watched her dog eat her neighbor's corpse. if you told her war is over do you think she can sleep?

It's turning the thunder into grace, knowing sometimes the break in your heart is like the hole in the flute. Sometimes it's the place where the music comes through.

Listen, I know you run your mouth so your mind can rest.

I like imagining your body is Saturn, my body ten thousand rings wrapped around you.

Some days my heart beats so fast my ribcage sounds like a fucking railroad track and my breath is a train I just can't catch.

We have all fought for our lives more than we know, survived our own questions.

Picasso said he'd paint with his own wet tongue on the dusty floor of a jail cell if he had to. We have to create. It is the only thing louder than destruction. It's the only chance the bard are gonna break, our hands full of color reaching towards the sky, a brush stroke in the dark. It is not too late. That starry night is not yet dry.

My mouth is a fire escape. The words coming out don't care that they are naked. There is something burning in here. When it burns I hold my own shell to my ear, listen for the parade from when I was seven, when the man who played the bagpipes wore a skirt. He was from Scotland. I wanted to move there. Wanted my spine to be the spine of an unpublished book, my faith the first and last page. The day my ribcage became monkey bars for a girl hanging on my every word they said, "You are not allowed to love her." Tried to take me by the throat to teach me, "You are not a boy." I had to unlearn their prison speak, refusing to make wishes on the star on the sheriff's chest. I started taking to the stars in the sky instead. I said, "Tell me about the big bang." The stars said, "It hurts to become.

It is incredible what kind of mess I can make with a nine-hour drive and an unanswered text.

I do not wear a welcome mat on my chest just so people can walk all over it fumbling with the keys to the locks they keep building for the doors I keep opening hoping someone will see the rainforest growing in my living room.

I started talking to the stars in the sky instead. I said, “Tell me about the big bang.” The stars said, “It hurts to become.

Let me say right now for the record, I’m still going to be here asking this world to dance, even if it keeps stepping on my holy feet. You, you stay here with me, okay? You stay here with me. Raising your bite against the bitter dark, your bright longing, your brilliant fists of loss. Friend, if the only thing we have to gain in staying is each other, my god that is plenty my god that is enough my god that is so so much for the light to give each of us at each other’s backs whispering over and over and over, “Live. Live. Live.

Tell me we'll be naming our children Beautiful and nothing else.

If love did not exist I would be so goddamn sane my poems would be billboards. Suburbia would be enough. I would not have to gut myself to find my spine crushed into powder and brushed on her cheekbones. My hair would not be a hummingbird’s nest. My mind would not have to move so fast to rest.

My mother says it is totally fine if I blow off steam as long as I speak in an octave my kindness can still reach.

When 28,000 buildings fall do you know how many walls are no longer there?

This life is built almost entirely of love and losing, isn’t it?

If you told her the war is over do you think she'd sleep?

I listened to the bells on the door and stole more than enough bottles for myself to understand that everyone's chest is a living room wall with awkwardly placed photographs hiding fist-shaped holes.

Tell me how they will no longer have to hide beneath burkas. How you will wrap them in lace ‘til they are all as conveniently rape-able as women in the States.

I like imagining your body is Saturn, my body ten thousand rings wrapped around you.

Next time I will know it’s normal to have a hard time breathing when you shake the dust. We make everything so complicated. Sometimes, the message in the bottle is “Don’t drink so much — there’s too much Novocaine in our wisdom teeth already.

My grandfather went to Heaven. I know this because he taught my mother how to wiggle her ears. I know this because my mother walks the same way my grandfather did and on the days my mother cannot get out of bed her single comfort is knowing she has his blood.

A doctor once told me I feel too much. I said, “So does God. That’s why you can see the Grand Canyon from the moon.

My mouth is a fire escape. The words coming out don’t care that they are naked. There is something burning in here.

Now my heart is a pressed flower in a tattered Bible. It is the one verse you can trust.

Love, you will never lose me to the wind. You are the lightning that made me fill my chest with candles. You are the thunder clapping for the poem nobody else wants to hear. You are an icicle’s tear watering a tulip on the first day of spring. You melt me alive. You kiss me deep as my roots will reach, and I want nothing more than

The nutritionist said I should eat root vegetables. Said if I could get down thirteen turnips a day I would be grounded, rooted. Said my head would not keep flying away to where the darkness lives. The psychic told me my heart carries too much weight. Said for twenty dollars she’d tell me what to do. I handed her the twenty. She said, “Stop worrying, darling. You will find a good man soon.” The first psycho therapist told me to spend three hours each day sitting in a dark closet with my eyes closed and ears plugged. I tried it once but couldn’t stop thinking about how gay it was to be sitting in the closet. The yogi told me to stretch everything but the truth. Said to focus on the out breath. Said everyone finds happiness when they care more about what they give than what they get. The pharmacist said, “Lexapro, Lamicatl, Lithium, Xanax.” The doctor said an anti-psychotic might help me forget what the trauma said. The trauma said, “Don’t write these poems. Nobody wants to hear you cry about the grief inside your bones.” But my bones said, “Tyler Clementi jumped from the George Washington Bridge into the Hudson River convinced he was entirely alone.” My bones said, “Write the poems.

... the taxonomic division of animals in a lost Chinese encyclopedia... (a) those that belong to the emperor; (b) embalmed ones; (c) those that are trained; (d) suckling pigs; (e) mermaids; (f) fabulous ones; (g) stray dogs; (h) those that are included in this classification; (i) those that tremble as if they were mad; (j) innumerable ones; (k) those that are drawn with a very fine camel's hair brush; (l) etcetera; (m) those that have just broken the flower vase; (n) those that at a distance resemble flies.

Shrieking with rage and frustration she attempted to trace the mysterious symptoms to their source, but the students told her stubbornly they were suffering “Umbridge-itis.” After putting four successive classes in detention and failing to discover their secret she was forced to give up and allow the bleeding, swooning, sweating, and vomiting students to leave her classes in droves. But not even the users of the Snackboxes could compete with that master of chaos, Peeves, who seemed to have taken Fred’s parting words deeply to heart. Cackling madly, he soared through the school, upending tables, bursting out of blackboards, and toppling statues and vases.

Peeves, who seemed to have taken Fred’s parting words deeply to heart. Cackling madly, he soared through the school, upending tables, bursting out of blackboards, toppling statues and vases; twice he shut Mrs Norris inside a suit of armour, from which she was rescued, yowling loudly, by the furious caretaker. Peeves smashed lanterns and snuffed out candles, juggled burning torches over the heads of screaming students, caused neatly stacked piles of parchment to topple into fires or out of windows; flooded the second floor when he pulled off all the taps in the bathrooms, dropped a bag of tarantulas in the middle of the Great Hall during breakfast and, whenever he fancied a break, spent hours at a time floating along after Umbridge and blowing loud raspberries every time she spoke.

As sometimes happened following a visit to Kent, the city had a chill to it that went beyond a sense of the air outside. Though Maisie loved her flat in Pimlico, there was a warmth to her father's cottage, to being at Chelstone, that made her feel cocooned and safe. And she felt wanted. That flat was hers to do with as she wished, and to do exactly as she pleased within those walls, but sometimes she felt it still held within it the stark just-moved-in feeling that signaled the difference between a house and a home. Of course, it still was not fully furnished, and there were no ornaments displayed - a vase, perhaps, that a visitor might comment upon and the hostess would say, "Oh, that was a gift, let me tell you about it..." There were no stories attached to the flat - but how could there be, when she was always alone in her home. There were no family photographs, no small framed portraits on the mantelpiece over the fire in the sitting room as there were at her father's house. She thought the flat would be all the better for some photographs, not only to serve as reminders of those who were loved, or reflections of happy times spent in company, but to act as mirrors, where she might see the affection with which she was held by those dear to her. A mirror in which she could see her connections. ... Most of the time, thought, she was not lonely, just on her own, an unmarried woman of independent means, even when the extent of the means - or lack thereof - sometimes gave her cause to remain awake at night. She knew the worries that came to the fore at night were the ones you had to pay attention to, for they blurred reasoned thought, sucked clarity from any consideration of one's situation, and could lead a mind around in circles, leaving one drained and ill-tempered. And if there was no one close with whom to discuss those concerns, they grew in importance in the imagination, whether were rooted in good sense or not. ... She wondered if one could take leave of one's senses, even if one had no previous occasions of mental incapacity, simply by being isolated from others. Is that what pushed the man over the edge of all measured thought? Were his thoughts so distilled, without the calibrating effect of a normal life led among others, that he ceased to recognize the distinction between right and wrong, between good and evil, or between having a voice and losing it? And if that were so, might an ordinary woman living alone with her memories, with her work, with the walls of her flat drawing in upon her, be at some risk of not seeing the world as it is?

I felt rippling wheat field and crows circling within me. I was a vase of sunflowers ready to spit seeds like weapons at the world. I understood how a man could be mad enough to slice off his own ear, just to get back the person he loved most in the world.

AMANDA: I said ridiculous ass! ELYOT [with great dignity]: Thank you. [There is a silence. AMANDA gets up, and turns the gramophone on] You'd better turn that off, I think. AMANDA [coldly]: Why? ELYOT: It's very late and it will annoy the people upstairs. AMANDA: There aren't any people upstairs. It's a photographer's studio. ELYOT: There are people downstairs, I suppose? AMANDA: They're away in Tunis. ELYOT: This is no time of the year for Tunis. [He turns the gramophone off.] AMANDA [icily]: Turn it on again, please. ELYOT: I'll do no such thing. AMANDA: Very well, if you insist on being boorish and idiotic. [She gets up and turns it on again.] ELYOT: Turn it off. It's driving me mad. AMANDA: You're far too temperamental. Try to control yourself. ELYOT: Turn it off. AMANDA: I won't. [ELYOT rushes at the gramophone. AMANDA tries to ward him off. They struggle silently for a moment, then the needle screeches across the record] There now, you've ruined the record. [She takes it off and scrutinizes it.] ELYOT: Good job, too. AMANDA: Disagreeable pig. ELYOT [suddenly stricken with remorse]: Amanda darling, Sollocks. AMANDA [furiously]: Sollocks yourself. [She breaks the record over his head.] ELYOT [staggering]: You spiteful little beast. [He slaps her face. She screams loudly and hurls herself sobbing with rage on to the sofa, with her face buried in the cushions.] AMANDA [wailing]: Oh, oh, oh- ELYOT: I'm sorry, I didn't mean it -- I'm sorry, darling, I swear I didn't mean it. AMANDA: Go away, go away, I hate you. [ELYOT kneels on the sofa and tries to pull her round to look at him.] ELYOT: Amanda -- listen -- listen -- AMANDA [turning suddenly, and fetching him a welt across the face]: Listen indeed; I'm sick and tired of listening to you, you damned sadistic bully. ELYOT [with great grandeur]: Thank you. [He stalks towards the door, in stately silence. AMANDA throws a cushion at him, which misses him and knocks down a lamp and a vase on the side table. ELYOT laughs falsely] A pretty display I must say. AMANDA [wildly]: Stop laughing like that. ELYOT [continuing]: Very amusing indeed. AMANDA [losing control]: Stop--stop--stop-- [She rushes at him, he grabs her hands and they sway about the room, until he manages to twist her round by the arms so that she faces him, closely, quivering with fury]--I hate you--do you hear? You're conceited, and overbearing, and utterly impossible! ELYOT [shouting her down]: You're a vile-tempered, loose-living; wicked little beast, and I never want to see you again so long as I live. [He flings her away from him, she staggers, and falls against a chair. They stand gasping at one another in silence for a moment.] AMANDA [very quietly]: This is the end, do you understand? The end, finally and forever.