Lydia Millet Quotes & Sayings

You don't see a fish in a chair often. — Lydia Millet

Oh how the world reflected you in its unending streams of atoms, churning atoms out of which significance beamed
significance, but not purpose. — Lydia Millet

His platform includes a prolife agenda, for instance, which "values the sanctity of every human soul," and also "believes in the greatness of the American family." The word family, on his glossy-but-down-home webpage in its hues of red, white and blue, is a code for you, where you also means right, deserving, genuine and better than those others, you know, the ones who aren't you. — Lydia Millet

Then he would get into a plane and leave the field wide open; the field was crammed with paralegals, all of them stoutly armed with condoms. — Lydia Millet

We were a roiling mass of opinion, most of it mean. Here we sat at civilization's technological peak, and what we chose to do on that shining pinnacle was hate each other's guts. — Lydia Millet

We all have our skill sets, right? — Lydia Millet

Love of knowledge can draw on its credit indefinitely ... love of knowledge is iron-clad. — Lydia Millet

Although she didn't have the plumbing, she deluded herself that she was the modern W.C. (about Margaret Thatcher, M.T.) — Lydia Millet

We're so many, we're so hard to distinguish from each other, but we long to be distinguished ... — Lydia Millet

People were like dogs and this was why they took pity on them
dogs alone all the hours of their days and always waiting. Always waiting for company. Dogs who, for all of their devotion, knew only the love of one or two or three people from the beginning of their lives till the end
dogs who, once those one or two had dwindled and vanished from the rooms they lived in, were never to be known again.
You passed like a dog through those empty houses, you passed through empty rooms ... there was always the possibility of companionship but rarely the real event. For most of the hours of your life no one knew or observed you at all. You did what you thought you had to; you went on eating, sleeping, raising your voice at intruders out of a sense of duty. But all the while you were hoping, faithfully but with no evidence, that it turned out, in the end, you were a prince among men. — Lydia Millet

Aw, group hug! No one's a mindless robot anymore. Score! — Lydia Millet

Helplessness was the one true fountain of youth. — Lydia Millet

Forget the buildings and the monuments. Let the softness of dark come in, all those light-years between stars and planets. Cities were the works of men but the earth before and after those cities, outside and beneath and around them, was the dream of a sleeping leviathan--it was god sleeping there and dreaming, the same god that was time and transfiguration. From whatever dreamed the dream at the source, atom or energy, flowed all the miracles of evolution--tiger, tiger burning bright, the massive whales in the deep, luminescent specters in their mystery. The pearls that were their eyes, their tongues that were wet leaves, their bodies that were the bodies of the fantastic.

Spectacular bestiaries of heaven, the limbs and tails of the gentle and the fearsome, silent or raging at will . . . they could never be known in every detail and they never should be. — Lydia Millet

Life is for trying. Don't you see? — Lydia Millet

The gun is mightier than the pen, was our true opinion, and the RPG is mightier still. — Lydia Millet

I have always wished the present to resemble memory: because the present can be flat at times, and bald as a road. But memory is never like that. It makes hills of feeling in collapsed hours, a scene of enclosure made all precious by its frame. — Lydia Millet

The rooms of his apartment were full with the dog home again, convalescing. He was satisfied to know, even when she was out of sight, that somewhere in the apartment she was sleeping or eating or sitting watchfully. It was family, he guessed, more or less. Did most people want a house of living things at night, to know that in the dark around them other warm bodies slept?
Such a house could even be the whole world. — Lydia Millet

What was a face on television but a code, and what was the difference between these faces but a realignment of line and color to shift among signals? If he grasped deeply this language of symbols, grasped it beneath the surface, he could course through the currents of authority as they coursed through him like heat or the tremble of cold. — Lydia Millet

Called by the sirens and followed by an albatross. — Lydia Millet

To hear Chip talk you'd think every Nebraskan male knows how to put a horseshoe on a mule. They know how to bring forth grain from dirt, or what a combine harvester is. They get what happens to that brought-forth grain, the steps before the Cheerios. The women knit long underwear and are adept at fruit canning. — Lydia Millet

Mer-people could be read as a colonialist term, explained the biologist. — Lydia Millet

Suffering itself is beloved: love and suffering are far closer to each other than love and pleasure. — Lydia Millet

Suffering ignites the spark of contact with the sublime and offers proof of humanity ... — Lydia Millet

Beneath the violet pillar, in the vacuum before the roar of the cloud, there came a soft sound that might have been heard by those who listened closely: the gentle sigh of an idea unbound. — Lydia Millet

Stay in these rooms for years and years, live on forever in a glorious museum. — Lydia Millet

It is not learning we need at all. Individuals need learning but the culture needs something else, the pulse of light on the sea, the warm urge of huddling together to keep out the cold. We need empathy, we need the eyes that still can weep. — Lydia Millet

Beyond aspects of pain that are physical, thought Oppenheimer, sickness or injury or privation, beyond the so-called obvious, suffering can be a work of art. It can be made of buried and rising things, helpless and undiscovered, song of frustrated want, silence after desire. It can be the test of the self falling short, constrained, distorted, disturbed or rebuffed, the vacuum left by longing, call without an answer. — Lydia Millet

If you're the kind of person who wants to know what's at the end of the universe, what's at the edge of being ... and comprehension settles on you that you'll never know, despair can well up. — Lydia Millet

We have seen these bodies, she would think, and even long after we are gone some particle in the universe will hold a memory of the words we once used to describe their beauty. — Lydia Millet

Freudian Slip: When You Mean One Thing And Say Your Mother. — Lydia Millet

One man's weakness is another man's mercy. — Lydia Millet

The word suffering is full and whole and perfect as a pierced heart, sweet, rushing and tender ... Suffering is the joy of someone about to be martyred, illumination of something given up as an offer. — Lydia Millet

We need people like you, Dobson," said Gina. "In academia, where I work. Man, do we ever need people like you. People who have been trained. To do the high-level work. Such as killing. — Lydia Millet

What place would that be, a whole world without roads? It was a panicking thought. A world without roads! He would go nowhere in such a place. He would be trapped where he was, he would have lived out his life only where he was born. — Lydia Millet

Kate Bernheimer's fiction offers a unique and delicate gift, the tempting mirage of a grace that constantly escapes. The Complete Tales of Merry Gold is an exceptional, lovely book, beautifully enigmatic, speaking a language that mysteriously evokes the unspoken. — Lydia Millet

Plus if there were really mermaids, I hoped they didn't look like Ariel. — Lydia Millet

There was the honour and austerity of money as he walked through art galleries, as he saw around him the collections of oil paintings by dead men, lit so carefully that warmth seemed to emanate from within - and not because their art was loved or understood but because it could be sold and bought for handsome sums. — Lydia Millet

We don't want to be the conquistadors. We want to be Charles Darwin. — Lydia Millet

Then there was the gray of human habitation. The blue places were turning brown, the yellow places to dust, the green places to smoke and ashes. Each time one of the animals disappeared
they went by species or sometimes by organizations of species, interconnected
it was as though all mountains were gone, or all lakes. A certain form of the world. But in the gray that metastasized over continents and hemispheres few appeared to be deterred by this extinguishing or even to speak of it, no one outside fringe elements and elite groups, professors and hippies, small populations of little general importance. The quiet mass disappearance, the inversion of the Ark, was passing unnoticed. — Lydia Millet