Patricia Lockwood Quotes

When you cannot pinpoint a pain in your body, the whole world seems to throb with it. Trees in pain, lit windows in pain, Wednesday nights in pain. Pianos flaming with pain, and the scale sliding up into a cry. ~ Patricia Lockwood

He clenched his small fist, bellowed his rage to the heavens, and resolved to never again recognize the authority of any man on earth. ~ Patricia Lockwood

I fuckin eat silence of crickets for fun. I got life after
life and a name like Baby. Every time I try to cry a tear
a new kittenhead grows out of me. ~ Patricia Lockwood

Most letters were love letters until they were not. ~ 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? ~ Patricia Lockwood

I simply ate a fish-head, but fish-heads won't fill
me now. Your attention is a fish-head,
so throw it back into my new body, back
into the body climbing the stairs. ~ Patricia Lockwood

Sometimes I have thought I was lonely and it turned out I was in reality wanting a snack, just like sometimes I have thought I was mad and it turned out I was actually wearing too many sweaters. ~ Patricia Lockwood

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

In a field where else you found a stack
of revealing nature photographs, of supernude nature
photographs, split beaver of course nature photographs,
photographs full of 70s bush, nature taking come
from every man from miles around, nature with come back
to me just dripping from her lips. The stack came
up to your eye, you saw: nature is big into bloodplay,
nature is into extreme age play, nature does wild inter-
racial, nature she wants you to pee in her mouth, nature
is dead and nature is sleeping and still nature is on all fours,
a horse it fucks nature to death up in Oregon, nature is hot
young amateur redheads, the foxes are all in their holes
for the night, nature is hot old used-up cougars, nature
makes gaping fake-agony faces, nature is consensual dad-
on-daughter, nature is completely obsessed with twins,
nature doing specialty and nature doing niche, exotic females
they line up to drip for you, nature getting paddled as hard
as you can paddle her, oh a whitewater rapid with her ass
in the air, high snowy tail on display just everywhere. ~ Patricia Lockwood

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. ~ Patricia Lockwood

When we came home later, my father was wearing his most transparent pair of boxer shorts, to show us he was angry, and drinking Baileys Irish Cream liqueur out of a miniature crystal glass, to show us his heart was broken. ~ Patricia Lockwood

My father despises cats. He believes them to be Democrats. He considers them to be little mean hillary clintons covered all over with feminist legfur. Cats would have abortions, if given half a chance. Cats would have abortions for fun. Consequently our own soft sinner, a soulful snowshoe named Alice, will stay shut in the bedroom upstairs, padding back and forth on cashmere paws, campaigning for equal pay, educating me about my reproductive system, and generally plotting the downfall of all men. ~ Patricia Lockwood

Dads didn't care about lightning, because lightning was on the cover of all their favorite albums. Sometimes it was painted on their trucks as well. You could tell that if their kids were killed by lightning, they would be sad, but they would also feel superior about it for the rest of their lives, because it was without question the most hard-as way for a child to die. "My son Randy . . ." they would say, their voices trailing, "taken from us by pure electricity in the year Nineteen Hundred and Ninety . . . ~ Patricia Lockwood

There's no law against a sentence existing in two places at once, unlike humans, who are no longer allowed to bilocate because it confuses the cops too much. ~ Patricia Lockwood

Whenever someone says the word "month" to me, I call up an empty square filled with other empty squares, days, and hours and minutes, bricks on bricks spiraling inward, pinwheel and diamond, and herringbone patterns marching smaller and smaller to some vanishing point. ~ Patricia Lockwood

All my life I have overheard, all my life I have listened to what people will let slip when they think you are part of their we. A we is so powerful. It is the most corrupt and formidable institution on earth. Its hands are full of the crispest and most persuasive currency. Its mouth is full of received, repeating language. The we closes its ranks to protect the space inside it, where the air is different. It does not protect people. It protects its own shape. ~ Patricia Lockwood

How do god fit him ass in them jeans when he is, in fact, Everywhere ~ Patricia Lockwood

What did those people teach you?" he asked me one night, mystified. "What exactly do Catholics believe?"

I'd been preparing my whole life for this question. "First of all, blood. BLOOD. Second of all, thorns. Third of all, put dirt on your forehead. Do it right now. Fourth of all, Martin Luther was a pig in a cloak. Fifth of all, Jesus is alive, but he's also dead, and he's also immortal, but he's also made of clouds, and his face is a picture of infinite peace, but he also always looks like one of those men in a headache commercial, because you'rec causing him so much suffering whenever you cuss. He is so gentle that sheep seem like demented murderers in his presence, but also rays of sunlight shoot out of his face so hard they can kill people. In fact, they do kill people, and one day they will kill you. He has a tattoo of a daisy on his lower back and he gets his hair permed every eight weeks. He's wearing a flowing white dress, but only because people didn't know about jeans back then. He's holding up two fingers because his dad won't let him have a gun. If he lived on earth, he would have a white truck, plastered with bumper stickers of Calvin peeing on a smaller Calvin who is not a Catholic."

Jason was aghast. "Thorns?" he whispered. "But that's the most dangerous part of the rose. ~ Patricia Lockwood

The question for someone who was raised in a closed circle and then leaves it, is what is the us, and what is the them, and how do you ever move from one to the other? ~ Patricia Lockwood

A trick I often use, when I feel overwhelming shame or regret, or brokenness beyond repair, is to think of a line I especially love, or a poem that arrived like lightning, and remember that it wouldn't have come to me if anything in my life had happened differently. Not that way. Not in those words. ~ Patricia Lockwood

I sometimes wish my childhood had been less obsessed with the question of why we are here. But that must be the question of any childhood. To write about your mother and father is to tell the story of your own close call, to count all the ways you never should have existed. To write about home is to write about how you dropped from space, dragging ellipses behind you like a comet, and how you entered your country and state and city, and finally your four-cornered house, and finally your mother's body and finally your own. From the galaxy to the grain and back again. From the fingerprint to the grand design. Despite all the conspiracies of the universe, we are here; every moment we are here we arrive. ~ Patricia Lockwood

I'm not interested in heaven unless my anger gets to go there too. I'm not interested in a happy eternity unless I get to spend an eternity on anger first. Let me speak for the meek and say that we don't want the earth, if that's where all the bodies are buried. If we are resurrected at the end of the world, I want us to assemble with a military click, I want us to come together as an army against what happened to us here. I want us to bring down the enemy of our suffering once and for all, and I want us to loot the pockets, and I want us to take baths in the blood. ~ Patricia Lockwood

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. ~ Patricia Lockwood

The half of her that is underwater would like to be
under a desk, the head of her that is underwater
would like to be fully immersed. ~ Patricia Lockwood

I tweet when the tweet arrives. Never force a tweet or you will hurt your babymaker - and this is true of literature as well. ~ Patricia Lockwood

The world is full of mystery but it must not be choked with secrets: we must talk to one another. ~ Patricia Hampl

I can't change the past abuse, but I can change the impact it has on me today! ~ Patricia Dsouza

Most of my life I've felt was dreaming. Now and then I wake up, sometimes for months, sometimes for minutes. Tonight I'm awake, and I lie thinking about the recent events and the people whose lives have crossed mine like veins in an old woman's hands. Their faces float past…the twisted and the lame...the strong…the loving…for we are all twisted and lame, strong and loving. ~ Patricia Harman

As audiences, when we are exposed to oral history projects not only do we learn but in some ways we also bear witness to that which we have not experienced personally. ~ Patricia Leavy

Well, I make that one murder victim, one police interrogation and one conversation with a ghost," George said. "Now that's what I call a busy evening."
Lockwood nodded. "To think some people just watch television. ~ Jonathan Stroud

The paranoid fear of government is an extremist position, and every one of us ought to say that ~ Patricia Schroeder

Madness and passion have always been interchangeable. Throughout the entire western literary tradition. Madness is an abundance of existence. Madness is a way of asking difficult questions. What did he mean, the powerless tyrant king? O Fool, I shall go mad.
Maybe madness is the excess of possibility, ... And writingis about reducing possibility to ne idea, one book, one sentence, one word. Madness is a form of self-expression. It is the opposite of creativity. You cannot make anything that can be separated from yourself if you are mad. And yet, look at Rimbaud
and your wonderful Christopher Smart. But don't harbour any romantic ideas about what it means to be mad. My language was my protection, my guarantee against madness and when there was no one to listen my language vanished along with my reader. ~ Patricia Duncker

Very well. You may help me to exterminate the society of wizards. ~ Patricia C. Wrede

I felt that Balanchine was my father towards me. He was the person I most admired and looked up to. ~ Patricia McBride

No, Lucy. Your mother doesn't really love men. They are a symptom of her obsessive quest of finding somebody who will make her whole. She doesn't understand that she has to make herself whole. ~ Patricia Cornwell

I don't want to go slumming in somebody else's pain just to write a book. I want to go into those darker places to shine a light on that experience and come out with a story that validates the human spirit. ~ Patricia McCormick

The light moves slowly down its flanks and gradually fills the lower valleys.

Kahn, Peter H. , Jr.
Hasbach, Patricia H.
2012-08-13 Ecopsychology ~ Peter H. Kahn Jr.

When terrorists find something that works they keep on doing it. It's predictable. ~ Patricia Cornwell

In description we hear and feel the absorption of the author in the material. We sense the presence of the creator of the scene.. This personal absorption is what we mean by 'style.' It is strange that we would choose so oddly surfacey a word - style - for this most soulful aspect of writing. We could, perhaps more exactly, call this relation between consciousness and its subject 'integrity.' What else is the articulation of perception? ~ Patricia Hampl

I kind of feel like people like to dump on 'Home Improvement,' and I don't know why. ~ Patricia Richardson

kitten doing?" Margaret asked ~ Patricia Fry

William!" I turned smiling. "Did they send you over?"
William shook his head. "They're still arguing, and it's spreading. Your professor has opinions."
I rolled my eyes, because it was William. "She's from Vinland. As far as she's concerned, wildlife is something you shoot first and study later. She's been complaining about the menagerie animals since the day she got to Mill City, especially this one. ~ Patricia C. Wrede

The silence continued and Patricia felt something bigger than her fear: solidarity. ~ Grady Hendrix

Bean Throwing Day (Japan): Usually February 3 or q,. A day to toss away your bad luck and welcome good fortune. Try making a bean salad, then plant at least one of the beans in the earth near your home for providence all year.
So ~ Patricia J. Telesco

An apology implies that you wouldn't do it again. (Adam) ~ Patricia Briggs

In poetry we pare down our thoughts into their most graceful shapes, like minimalist sculptures. ~ Patricia Robin Woodruff

Cats of great personality are always found in association with sensitive, cat-conscious people; it is a two-way process of immense mutual benefit. ~ Patricia Moyes

It's obvious what's timeless and what is not timeless, but you need time to find that answer. ~ Patricia Field

The task of the excellent teacher is to stimulate 'apparently ordinary' people to unusual effort. The tough problem is not in identifying winners: it is in making winners out of ordinary people. ~ K. Patricia Cross

Mercy?" His voice was very calm, that "people are going to die" calm only he could do. As soon as he started to speak, silence fell behind him because I wasn't the only one who knew that voice. ~ Patricia Briggs

When it comes to college education, American families are paying more and getting less. ~ Patricia Schroeder

[When asked, as a prospective Presidential candidate, whether she had ever committed adultery:] No. But then most congresswomen don't have 25-year-old lifeguards throwing themselves at their feet around this place. ~ Patricia Schroeder

Some of us may just, in one-on-one conversations with our family, with our friends, over the back fence with our neighbors, talk about the reality of our lives and realize that we're not alone, that we have a right to be physically safe and emotionally safe in our own homes. ~ Patricia Ireland

The Cantrip agents were more interesting. He didn't know as much about Cantrip, as it was an even newer agency than Homeland Security, having come into being when the werewolves outed themselves. ~ Patricia Briggs

I write fantasy because it's there. I have no other excuse for sitting down for several hours a day indulging my imagination. Daydreaming. Thinking up imaginary people, impossible places. Imagination is the golden-eyed monster that never sleeps. It must be fed; it cannot be ignored.
Making it tell the same tale over again makes it thin and whining; its scales begin to fall off; its fiery breath becomes a trickle of smoke. It is best fed by reality, an odd diet for something nonexistant; there are few details of daily life and its broad range of emotional context that can't transformed into food for the imagination. It must be visited constantly, or else it begins to become restless and emit strange bellows at embarrassing moments; ignoring it only makes it grown larger and noisier. Content, it dreams awake, and spins the fabric of tales. There is really nothing to be done with such imagery except to use it: in writing, in art. Those who fear the imagination condemn it: something childish, they say, something monsterish, misbegotten. Not all of us dream awake. But those who do have no choice. ~ Patricia A. McKillip

SPEAK TO THE CHILD WITHIN YOU: Tell the child within you, the one that has remained buried that the "adult" in you is positively safe and sound. Start treating the damaged "you" just the way you would have wished to be handled when you were a child. ~ Patricia Dsouza

You were born with the power to change others. You change people by the way you treat them. That is what changes the human heart. ~ Patricia Polacco