24 Quotes by Rikki Ducornet

What are books but tangible dreams? What is reading if it is not dreaming? The best books cause us to dream; the rest are not worth reading.

I like to imagine that Adam's tongue, his palate and his lips were always on fire, that the air he breathed was kindled to incandescence each time he cried out in sorrow or delight. If fiction can be said to have a function, it is to release that primary fury of which language, even now, is miraculously capable - from the dry mud of daily use. So that furred, spotted and striped, it may - as it did in Eden - scrawl under every tree as revelation.

I, sole heir to the Munodi line and memory, am childless. A friend who knows such things has told me that this explains my compulsion to capture what I can with black ink on white paper." ("The Volatilized Ceiling of Baron Munodi")

The purpose of myth, therefore, is to both reveal and conceal. To tell what we have seen and disguise it, to mask God's forked tongue.

A book is a private thing, citizen; it belongs to the one who writes it and to the one who reads it. Like the mind itself, a book is a private space. Within that space, anything is possible. The greatest evil and the greatest good.

Next I prayed to Allah, whose ears are deaf; then did I beseech his fallen twin, the Devil Hornprick, who sits upon his thorn of fire, gloating upon his constellations and counting his bloody seeds. In Baclava it is said Hornprick once caught a glimpse of the First Woman, as she sat singing to her snake in her chamber of sacred mud. Dazzled by her sight, the light of love and lust, he fell. He is still falling. For all eternity her breasts orbit his dreams.

An important memory is like a gravitational field--the mind is compelled to return to it again and again. It is like a moon; it lives in light and shadow.

The texts we write are not visible until they are written. Like a creature coaxed from out a deep wood, the text reveals itself little by little.

A fan is like the thighs of a woman: It opens and closes. A good fan opens with a flick of the wrist. It produces its own weather---a breeze not so strong as to muss the hair.