37 Quotes by Patricia Lockwood

Who among us is not the great I AM? Who among us doesn't live in a nightgown or some other bare-ass outfit at the center of his own wide sky--shining, unchanging, without beginning or end, a word in the east and a body in the west?

Every day we were seeing new evidence that suggested it was the portal that had allowed the dictator to rise to power. This was humiliating. It would be like discovering that the Vietnam War was secretly caused by ham radios, or that Napoleon was operating exclusively on the advice of a parrot named Brian.

We worshipped a great white body that was an avalanche of good news, and we slit it open in every part. “That can’t go through the mail,” the postman gasped, “because that is a super-stabbed body!” The super-stabbed body rose up, with many butterknives sticking out of it, and said, “I AM the mail.” It had so many lovers.

I like domestic stuff,"he tells me, his voice falling to a sudden romance-novel huskiness. So fuck a butler. Men, it bears repeating, are so weird.

This is the secret: when I encounter myself on the page, I am shocked at how forceful I seem. On the page I am strong, because that is where I put my strength. On the page I am everything that I am not, because that is where I put myself. I am no longer whispering through the small skirted shape of a keyhole: the door is knocked down and the roof is blown off and I am aimed once more at the entire wide night.

See men for miles around give nature what she needs,rivers and rivers and rivers of it. You exhale with perfecthappiness. Nature turned you down in high school. Now you can come in her eye.

I thought a voice had to be about your fluency, your dexterity, your virtuosity. But in fact your voice could be about your failings, your falterings, your physical limits. The voices that ring hardest in our heads are not the perfect voices. They are the voices with an additional dimension, which is pain.

As they perform this ritual, I almost have to turn away, thinking again what a boomeranging, out-of-body experience it is to watch a religious childhood from the outside, when before I was in the very marrow of it.

What do you mean you've been spying on me, with this thing in my hand that is an eye?