Tracey Smith Quotes

Brian Wilson went to bed for three years. Jean-Michel Basquiat would spend all day in bed. Monica Ali, Charles Bukowski, Marcel Proust, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Tracey Emin, Emily Dickinson, Edith Sitwell, Frida Kahlo, William Wordsworth, René Descartes, Mark Twain, Henri Matisse, Kathy Acker, Derek Jarman and Patti Smith all worked or work from bed and they’re productive people. (Am I protesting too much?) Humans take to their beds for all sorts of reasons: because they’re overwhelmed by life, need to rest, think, recover from illness and trauma, because they’re cold, lonely, scared, depressed – sometimes I lie in bed for weeks with a puddle of depression in my sternum – to work, even to protest (Emily Dickinson, John and Yoko). Polar bears spend six months of the year sleeping, dormice too. Half their lives are spent asleep, no one calls them lazy. There’s a region in the South of France, near the Alps, where whole villages used to sleep through the seven months of winter – I might be descended from them. And in 1900, it was recorded that peasants from Pskov in northwest Russia would fall into a deep winter sleep called lotska for half the year: ‘for six whole months out of the twelve to be in the state of Nirvana longed for by Eastern sages, free from the stress of life, from the need to labour, from the multitudinous burdens, anxieties, and vexations of existence’.‡ Even when I’m well I like to lie in bed and think. It’s as if

Yet Tracey was steadfast and loyal to his memory, far more likely to defend her absent father than I was to speak kindly of my wholly attentive one.

That was perfect, because Tracey knows Jon better than anybody, and what he might really want, and what he’s capable of saying he wants. Plus, also, I think in the back of both my head and Stephen’s was, if Jon is really pissed afterward, we can say, “Hey, Tracey said it was okay!” STEPHEN COLBERT: Find somebody to throw under the bus—that’s the first rule of show business.

...and watching him I felt I understood now what Tracey had meant by placing her father and Michael Jackson in one reality, and I didn't find that she was a liar, exactly, or at least I felt that within the lie there was a deeper truth. They were touched by the same inheritance. And if Louie's dancing happened not to be famous like Michael's, well, this was, to Tracey, only a kind of technicality—an accident of time and place—and now, thinking back on his dancing, writing it all down, I think she was exactly right.

I look warmly at the December winters in my life, feeling all of their wonderful, furry, fuzzies inside, as I ribbon-rap my thanks to God for His increase of faithfulness, love, favor, fortune and blessings…at this year’s end finish line. The satisfaction in my smile is smithed with THE silver refiner’s fire, my cheeks aglow like the rose stemmed in my soul’s purified Gold.

Unlike my mother, he had no anxiety in connection with her, he found her single-minded dedication to her dancing sweet, and also, I think, admirable- it appealed to his work ethic- and it was very clear that Tracey adored my father, was even a little in love with him. She was so painfully grateful for the way he talked to her like a father, although sometimes he went too far in this direction, not understanding that what came after borrowing a father for a few minutes was he pain of having to give him back.

Unlike my mother, he had no anxiety in connection with her, he found her single-minded dedication to her dancing sweet, and also, I think, admirable- it appealed to his work ethic- and it was very clear that Tracey adored my father, was even a little in love with him. She was so painfully grateful for the way he talked to her like a father, although sometimes he went too far in this direction, not understanding that what came after borrowing a father for a few minutes was the pain of having to give him back.

... - I couldn't help but notice the placidity of a small female household. In Tracey's home, disappointment in the man was ancient history: they never really had any hope in him, for he had almost never been at home.

It felt to me as if I were on a certain train, heading wherever it was people like me usually went...except now suddenly something was different. I'd been informed that I would be getting off at an unexpected stop, further down the line. I thought of my father, pushed off the train before he'd barely left the station. And of Tracey, so determined to jump off, exactly *because* she'd rather walk than be told what stop was hers or how far she was allowed to go.

Monique is part of a pioneering trial of Tracey’s big idea. The research is being run by Paul-Peter Tak, a rheumatologist at the Academic Medical Center at the University of Amsterdam and GlaxoSmithKline. Tak started with a pilot study of eight patients with long-standing rheumatoid arthritis, who had failed all other treatments. Their implants delivered 60-second bursts of vagal nerve stimulation (VNS), once per day for 42 days. Tak reported in 2012 that six of the patients benefited significantly, with improved symptoms, and reduced levels of inflammation in their blood.