Christine Brooke-Rose Quotes

It does seem, in other words, not only more difficult for a woman experimental writer to be accepted than for a woman writer (which corresponds to the male situation of experimental writer vs. writer), but also peculiarly more difficult for a woman experimental writer to be accepted than for a male experimental writer. She may, if young, get caught up in a "movement," like Djuna Barnes, like H.D., like Laura Riding, as someone's mistress, and then be forgotten, or if old, she maybe "admitted" into a group, under a label, but never quite as seriously considered as the men in that group.

But it is the repetition, from all walks of life, that slowly destroys, turns the looking-glass into a mirror, distorting or true, both cruel.

Dear friends & fellow characters, you all know the importance we attach to the power of collective prayer in this our desperate struggle for survival. Some of us have more existence than others, at various times according to fashion. But even this is becoming extremely shadowy & precarious, for we are not read, & when read , we are read badly, we are not lived as we used to be, we are not identified with & fantasized, we are rapidly forgotten. Those of us who have the good fortune to be read by teachers, scholars, & students are not read as we used to be read, but analyzed as schemata, structures, functions within structures, logical & mathematical formulae, aporia, psychic movements, social significances & so forth.

How strange. The power of the spirit over the permanence of celluloid. A fantasy, fixed in time yet fleeting. The spirit. He pauses & nods perceptibly. The Spirit is the Reader. What the reader constructs is the Other, & the Other is contained in his flight, the definition of the Other is flight. To fix the Other is to lose him, to let him flee & grow is to keep him.