“It is a condition of monsters that they do not perceive themselves as such.”
—Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red
“Who hasn’t ever wondered: am I monster or is this what it means to be a person?”
—Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star
—Catherynne M. Valente, The Orphan’s Tales: In the Night Garden
“They say I’m a beast. And feast on it. When all along I thought that’s what a woman was.”
—Sandra Cisneros, Loose Woman
“The she-monster is hardly a new phenomenon. The idea of a female untamed nature which must be leashed or else will wreak havoc closely reflects mythological heroes’ struggles against monsters. Greek myth alone offers a host - of Ceres, Harpies, Sirens, Moirae. Associated with fate and death in various ways, they move swiftly, sometimes on wings; birds of prey are their closest kin - the Greeks didn’t know about dinosaurs - and they seize as in the word raptor. But seizure also describes the effect of the passions on the body; inner forces, looser, madness, arte, folly, personified in Homer and the tragedies as feminine, snatch and grab the interior of the human creature and take possession.”
—Marina Warner, Managing Monsters: Six Myths of Our Time; “Monstrous Mothers”
“I don’t want to be a person. I want to be unbearable.”
—Louise Glück, “Blue Rotunda”
“How can I teach her / some way of being human / that won’t destroy her?”
—Margaret Atwood, Two-Headed Poems
“…and what I want to say / is that I am not what I was, I am / a changeling, half-creaturely,”
—Camille Norton, Corruption: Poems; “Wild Animals I Have Known”
“People feel that in her, the nonhuman. People are afraid of her. Something in her inspires a nonhuman attachment. Sur elle, the human feelings seem to slip, they glisser—”
—Anaïs Nin, Nearer the Moon
—Camille Norton, Corruption: Poems; “Index of Prohibited Images”
“She had a feral gaze like that of an untamed animal,”
—Margaret Atwood, Murder in the Dark: Stories; “Women’s Novels”
“…does she wander still, searching human faces / For one who might speak of her / In her own language, look into her eyes / And gentle the wildness once and for all?”
—May Sarton, Letters from Maine: New Poems
“How can she bear the pain of becoming human? The end of exile is the end of being.”
—Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories; “The Lady of the House of Love”
—Hélène Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa
“A woman in the shape of a monster / a monster in the shape of a woman / the skies are full of them”
—Adrienne Rich, “Planetarium”
“A monster is not such a terrible thing to be. From the Latin root monstrum, a divine messenger of catastrophe, then adapted by the Old French to mean an animal of myriad origins: centaur, griffin, satyr. To be a monster is to be a hybrid signal, a lighthouse: both shelter and warning at once.”
—Ocean Vuong, “A Letter To My Mother That She Will Never Read”
“Personally, I’m a mess of conflicting impulses—I’m independent and greedy and I also want to belong and share and be a part of the whole. I doubt that I’m the only one who feels this way. It’s the core of monster making, actually. Wanna make a monster? Take the parts of yourself that make you uncomfortable—your weaknesses, bad thoughts, vanities, and hungers—and pretend they’re across the room. It’s too ugly to be human. It’s too ugly to be you. Children are afraid of the dark because they have nothing real to work with. Adults are afraid of themselves. Oh we’re a mess, poor humans, poor flesh—hybrids of angels and animals, dolls with diamonds stuffed inside them. We’ve been to the moon and we’re still fighting over Jerusalem. Let me tell you what I do know: I am more than one thing and not all of those things are good. The truth is complicated. It’s two-toned, multi-vocal, bittersweet. I used to think that if I dug deep enough to discover something sad and ugly, I’d know it was something true. Now I’m trying to dig deeper.”
—Richard Siken, Spork’s Editor’s Pages: Black Telephone
“Is it better to out-monster the monster or to be quietly devoured?”
—Friedrich Nietzsche, Good and Evil
“I was driven because I wanted to be like others. / I was afraid of what was wild and indecent in me.”
—Czeslaw Miłosz, “Account”
“When I looked around, I saw and heard of none like me. Was I then a monster?”
—Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
“Draw a monster. Why is it a monster?”
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