Joyelle McSweeney Quotes & Sayings

You are reading while walking, she reads. You can't see your feet. The spread pages glide over the sidewalk, mottled by leaf shadows, by moonlight and streetlight. Over continents of shadow, continents of light. The book is a bird with white wings. You are a bird. Reading, you can fly.
You are flying now. — Joyelle McSweeney

The Internet is such a paradoxical space - it's limitless and totally bounded, apparently free yet corporate-controlled, apparently invisible yet surveilled, a place of disembodiment where bodies are policed and enviolenced, a place that is apparently 'nowhere'. — Joyelle McSweeney

My notion of art is very maximalist and souped-up: I love spectacle, overload, magic materials, magic words, incantation and litany, incarnation and possession, spilling and wounds. Art as a sacred event. — Joyelle McSweeney

The Internet is a graveyard, a bright malfunctioning littoral, and it is entirely necropastoral. But the necropastoral can't be sustained - it's non-sustainable. — Joyelle McSweeney

You can't drive to the coastline. You can only drive so close to the white chalky cliff and then you have to get out and dive. — Joyelle McSweeney

I've begun to recognize myself as a Catholic writer because my whole notion of the image, of symbol, of art and what it can do, has been conditioned by my immersion in Catholic culture, ritual, and art since my earliest days. Catholicism seeped into me through every pore. Catholicism is about seeping and pores! — Joyelle McSweeney