[philosophybits]

“To be acutely conscious is a disease, a real, honest-to-goodness disease.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground

[angelicdewdrop]

[pcybervenus]

“I can't go back into the past and change it, but I have noticed that the future changes the past. What I call the past is my memory of it and my memory is conditioned by who I am now. Who I will be. The only way for me to handle what is happening is to move myself forward into someone who has handled it. As yet that person does not exist. She has not those resources. I will have to make her as Jewish legend tells how God made the first man: by moulding a piece of dirt and breathing life into it. The dirt I have in plenty. The life I will have to draw out of lungs unused to deep breathing.”

— Jeanette Winterson, Gut Symmetries

[pcybervenus]

“When we killed what we were to become what we are, what did we do with the bodies? We did what most people do; buried them under the floorboards and got used to the smell. I've lived my life like a serial killer; finish with one part, strangle it and move on to the next. Life in neat little boxes is life in neat little coffins, the dead bodies of the past laid out side by side. I am discovering, now, in the late afternoon of the day, that the dead still speak. Past? Present? Future? The language of the dead. Totality of time.”

— Jeanette Winterson, Gut Symmetries

[pcybervenus]

“He frowned at me as though I were an inelegant equation; necessary but cumbersome, a bore to manipulate. I was no longer his living beauty of physical laws. No doubt he was telling her about the poetry of numbers. I looked in the mirror. Was that my face? I was gargoyled with grief. A stretched taunted thing. A waterspout of misery. He had poured his indifference down on me and I had let it out as dirty water. He thought I was the dirty water not himself. Is it crazy to act crazy in a crazy situation? It has logic It may even have dignity if dignity is what hallmarks the human spirit and preserves it.”

— Jeanette Winterson, Gut Symmetries

[pcybervenus]

“Undeceive yourself Alice, a great part of you is trash. True, but my hope lies in the rest.”

— Jeanette Winterson, Gut Symmetries

[pcybervenus]

“I know I am a fool, trying to make connections out of scraps but how else is there to proceed? The fragmentariness of life makes coherence suspect but to babble is a different kind of treachery. Perhaps it is a vanity. Am I vain enough to assume you will understand me? No. So I go on puzzling over new joints for words, hoping that this time, one piece will slide smooth against the next. Walk with me. Hand in hand through the nightmare of narrative, the neat sentences secret-nailed over meaning. Meaning mewed up like an anchorite, its vision in broken pieces behind the wall. And if we pull away the panelling, then what? Without the surface, what hope of contact, of conversation? How will I come to read the rawness inside? The story of my day, the story of my life, the story of how we met, of what happened before we met. And every story I begin to tell talks across a story I cannot tell. And if I were not telling this story to you but to someone else, would it be the same story?”

— Jeanette Winterson, Gut Symmetries

[pcybervenus]

“I am civilised but my needs are not. What it is that lashes in the darkness? What or who? I cannot name myself.”

— Jeanette Winterson, Gut Symmetries

[pcybervenus]

“Forgive me if I digress. I cannot tell you who I am unless I tell you why I am. I cannot help you to take a measurement until we both know where we stand. This is the difficulty. Now that physics is proving the intelligence of the universe what are we to do about the stupidity of humankind? I include myself. I know that the earth is not flat but my feet are. I know that space is curved but my brain has been cordoned by habit to grow in a straight line. What I call light is my own blend of darkness. What I call a view is my hand-painted trompe-l'oeil. I run after knowledge like a ferret down a ferret hole. My limitations, I call the boundaries of what can be known. I interpret the world by confusing other people's psychology with my own. I say I am open-minded but what I think is.”

— Jeanette Winterson, Gut Symmetries

[pcybervenus]

“What is it that you contain? The Dead. Time. Light patterns of millennia. The expanding universe opening in your gut. Are your twenty-three feet of intestines loaded with stars?”

— Jeanette Winterson, Gut Symmetries

[pcybervenus]

“Can anyone deny that we are haunted? What is it that crouches under the myths we have made? Always the physical presence of something split off.”

— Jeanette Winterson, Gut Symmetries

[derangedrhythms]

My husband has started an affair. Cherchez la femme. Where is she?    Ransack the bedroom. The master bedroom well named. In a rip of pillow and sheet I shall tear her stigmata off the mattress. Is that her imprint, faint but discernible? My radioactive hands will sense her. Whatever bits of hair and flesh she has left behind I will find and crucible her.    Give me a pot and let me turn cannibal. I will feast on her with greater delight than he. If she is his titbit then I will gourmet her. Come here and discover what it is to be spiced, racked and savoured. I will eat her slowly to make her last longer. Whatever he has done I will do. Did he eat her? Then so will I. And spit her out.

Jeanette Winterson, Gut Symmetries

[pcybervenus]

"Why did she want to leave? Why did she want to break the enchantment? Weren't their destinies bound together, by now, forever? He needed her in order to live, her eyes, her voice, her thoughts... He was completely penetrated by that love; all his blood was adulterated as if by poison, with no remedy. Why did she want to flee! He would wind himself around her, he would first suffocate her against his chest. No, it could not be. Never! Never!"

Gabriele D’Annunzio, Pleasure

[2011x2011]

[pcybervenus]

— Fyodor Dostoevsky, White Nights

[pcybervenus]

— Fyodor Dostoevsky, White Nights

[pcybervenus]

— Fyodor Dostoevsky, White Nights