Runnin' Wild

Married mother of two, living by the sea My Website ES Updates You can find my old Tumblr here

[mergirl27]

“I’ve been constantly in situations in my life and career where I’ve had no technique, but if you just feel enough, you will get away with murder.” 

- Audrey Hepburn, from Dutch Girl by Robert Matzen

[mergirl27]

“She was anonymous: a woman with a mutable story, a changeable history, someone who recognised that the world didn’t care about her, and chose to use that as a weapon in order to survive.” 

- Hallie Rubenhold, ‘The Five’

[mergirl27]

"She's not ashamed. Everything she was taught and learned by rote as a child has left her, gone away. What's new and has come in exchange has washed away the fears, just as a flood from melting snow washes away last year's twigs and decayed leaves." 

Guzel Yakhina, Zuleikha

[mergirl27]

"When you sat down on the side of the bed, the springs gave a little, but not much. You looked around and recognised that this room was her secret, that you shouldn't have been there. Not that it was wrong, no, not that, but something more. You could feel it without having the words to say it, a kind of sorry. Not the sorry from robbing or getting hit or chased or even the sorry when you’d find your ma in a state or when your brothers jeered at your da behind his back. It was a new sorry that you felt you’d have for always."

Karl Geary, Montpelier Parade 

[mergirl27]

“I had fifteen-year dances Church basement romances, yeah, I've cried Spilling my guts with the Bowery bums Is the only love I've ever known...”

Lana Del Rey, ‘Hope is a Dangerous Thing For a Woman Like Me to Have - But I Have It’  

[mergirl27]

I’m proud to have contributed a sixteen-page article about David Lynch’s return to Twin Peaks for Volume 1 of SOLEDAD, a new arts journal. It’s the opening instalment in a two-part series - more info here.

[mergirl27]

“To start off let’s know that the people of this place don’t have a soft record when it comes to convicting people of evildoing. Poor souls. You know, don’t you, that in the early years if you were the least bit own-minded they’d call you a devil and burn you like a pig, roast you. There was nothing like a defence lawyer for someone they called a witch, nobody to prove them wrong by law. The law was all set up to keep people convinced their fears were well-guided. They came up with ways to prove themselves right about people who seemed a little different. All witches, they said, felt pain if you stuck them in the ribs and sank in water if you tied them down. For God’s sake, of course. Now we know it’s what’s called a personality—a difference of opinion. And thank God for that freedom, right, right. And these children pretending spells and things. All just spoiled brats dipping their hands in the wrong pots ... I think the Devil’s just a story to scare children so they act right. And I think we should have more respect than to scare one another straight. I think people act in error, sure. It’s human. God alone is perfect and the rest is for shit, excuse me. So who’s to blame? That’s why I’m on the defensive side. It’s a natural fit with me. Not anyone should be condemned."

From McGlue by Ottessa Moshfegh

[mergirl27]

“When Lien wants to write to her father for his birthday on 10 December, Auntie has to tell her that there is no address to write to, that their papers have been displaced. That afternoon it is quiet in the kitchen, and Lien sits herself down in a corner. On her finger she has two little rings that were a gift from her parents, one silver and one gold. She takes them off and starts to roll them up and down along the floorboards, from one hand to the other and back. First one and then the second slips down through a gap by the wall into the darkness. Lien does not remember thinking about her parents at all for a long time after that.”

From The Cut Out Girl: A Story of War and Family, Lost and Found by Bart Van Es

[mergirl27]

“There's something in the water I can taste it turning sour It's bitter, I'm coughing But now it's in my blood...”

- Lana Del Rey, ‘Change’

[mergirl27]

"Uncertainty—that is appropriate for matters of this world. Only regarding the next can we vouchsafe certainty. I believe certainty regarding that which we can see and touch, it is seldom justified, if ever. Down the ages from our remote past, what certainties survive? And yet we hurry to fashion new ones, wanting their comfort."

- From The Ballad of Buster Scruggs 

[mergirl27]

My tribute to Madonna, who turns sixty today.

[mergirl27]

“These were the daughters of people who were beautiful, brave, and foolhardy, who had left their homes and travelled to movie dreams. In the Depression, when most of them came here, people with brains went to New York and people with faces went West. After being born of parents who believed in physical beauty as a fact of power, and being born beautiful themselves, these girls were then raised in California, where statistically the children grow taller, have better teeth and are stronger than anywhere else in the country. When they reach the age of 15 and their beauty arrives, it’s very exciting - like coming into an inheritance and, as with inheritances, it’s fun to be around when they first come into the money and watch how they spend it and on what.” 

- Eve Babitz, Eve’s Hollywood

[mergirl27]

“Sometimes Ginia would stop in the streets as she suddenly became aware of the smells of summer, its sounds and colours and the shadows of the plane-trees. She thought of them while she was still surrounded by mud and snow; she would stop at the street-corners, desire catching at her throat. ‘It must come, the seasons never change,’ but somehow it seemed improbable now that she was all alone. ‘I’m an old woman, that’s what it is. All the good days are over.’”

Cesare Pavese, The Beautiful Summer

[mergirl27]

“So much goes on that people will never know with every film. You can tell all the stories you want, but you still haven’t gotten across what the experience was like. It’s like telling somebody a dream. It doesn’t give them the dream.”

David Lynch, Room to Dream

[mergirl27]

“This is one of the troubles and wonders of childhood: you imagine things wrongly. And later, when the truth is known - assuming there is an absolute truth - the unwinding of the imagined thing is tangled, because the first image keeps on obstinately breaking through. You’re adrift in mystery and ambiguity. And yet for a writer’s imagination, the unfixed place is sometimes a promising place to dwell.” 

- Rose Tremain, Rosie: Scenes From a Vanished Life

[mergirl27]

“It was the way of Emma Lou always to create her worlds within her own mind without taking consideration the fact that other people and other elements, not contained within herself, would also have to aid in their molding. She had lived to herself for so long, had been shut out from the stream of things in which she was interested for such a long time during the formative years of her life, that she considered her own imaginative powers omniscient. Thus she constructed a future world of love on one isolated experience, never thinking for the moment that the other party concerned might not be of the same mind.”

From The Blacker the Berry by Wallace Thurman

[mergirl27]

“She taught me this above all else: things which don’t shift and grow are dead things. They are things the witchery people want. Witchery works to scare people, to make them fear growth. But it has always been necessary, and more than ever now, it is. Otherwise we won’t make it. We won’t survive. That’s what the witchery is counting on: that we will cling to the ceremonies the way they were, and then their power will triumph, and the people will be no more.”

From Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko