Nell Zink Quotes & Sayings
Enjoy the top 60 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Nell Zink.
Famous Quotes By Nell Zink
(It was accepted practice to let your husband camp out in summer near a source of sweet wine and steaks past their sell-by date, but you had to take him back in winter.) — Nell Zink
I never take pictures. Skies are much larger in reminiscences and my friends are much better-looking. Photos crop reality into little squares; instead, I have very good binoculars. — Nell Zink
Gradually her fear faded to the existential angst that incessantly haunts all mankind in modernity. — Nell Zink
What's important is the tolerance. If people are not beating other people up, or shooting them for being different, then that's progress. Even if the ideas that go through their head are fodder for novelists. — Nell Zink
In the rural South, the only interesting people were the sexual deviants. Everybody else was able to be part of the mainstream, and could find a way somehow. — Nell Zink
There was no circumcision. Lee said circumcision was dreamed up by moralists and lotion salesmen to make hand jobs chafe, and Peggy deferred to his better judgement. — Nell Zink
If you have to be bad, be so bad sympathetic hearers just shake their heads and give up. Nobody — Nell Zink
What is a poem, if not a toy mouse viewed from an angle that makes it appear to take over the world? Lee — Nell Zink
Lee explained to her that art for art's sake is an upper-class aesthetic. To create art divorced from any purpose, you can't be living a life driven by need and desire. — Nell Zink
the heartrending petty bourgeois piteousness of cucumber sandwiches passed around by accounting majors whose overly colorful bow ties had been expressly chosen to keep them from looking like waiters. — Nell Zink
(why exactly twenty-somethings are considered so vital to protest movements, I never figured out, seeing as how they never vote and have no money) — Nell Zink
I'd say it's never a challenge to present white and heteronormative privilege. The hard thing is to write any other way. — Nell Zink
Whatever I was writing at the time, I knew there was no market for it and never would be, because there's never a market for true art, so my main concern was always to have a job that didn't require me to write or think. — Nell Zink
If and when family planning is the responsibility of females, males are best kept under lock and key. — Nell Zink
I felt like the Empress Theodora. Can I get more orifices? I thought. Is that what she meant in the Historia Arcana - not that three isn't enough, but that the three on offer aren't enough to sustain a marriage? — Nell Zink
The interesting artists I know are the ones doing political work. The most interesting people I know are the people who care about politics. — Nell Zink
She simply knew she was about to lose something valuable, and like anybody else, she wanted to take the next logical step to make it her own: She wanted to fuck it. — Nell Zink
I really like writing in English, and it's the best job I've ever had. — Nell Zink
College girls on the road! One-night stands! Lee felt like an Austro-Hungarian emperor attended on his deathbed by flappers. He felt them stealing his life - literally going back in time and taking, through their incoherent lifestyles, the little he had struggled so hard to attain. — Nell Zink
Besides, adulthood is never something girls grow into. It is something they have thrust upon them, menstruation being only the first of many two-edged swords subsumed under the rubric "becoming a woman," all of them occasions to stay home from school and weep. — Nell Zink
Fatherhood surprised him pleasantly. As a male he assumed no unpleasant duties would accrue to him. He would be responsible for teaching the child conversational skills once it reached its teens. — Nell Zink
For jobs and men, it's a seller's market. There are no other fish in the sea. — Nell Zink
it's the stories we tell ourselves that cause all the problems. If you look reality straight in the eye, you end up a lot less confused. — Nell Zink
Case in point: Byrdie, the son growing effortlessly into lifelong boyhood. Still a schoolboy, soon to be an old boy, blithely accepting accidents as privileges - for instance, his natural immunity to HIV. (Byrdie liked studious, upper-class females. They were not exactly high risk.) Byrdie was the phoenix edition of Lee, adapted to the novel environment, and Lee was a useless relic. He had positioned himself all his life as a rebel against a hegemonic order no one was interested in questioning anymore. It had lost its power to crush and all its clumsy weapons that inspired active fear. Its dominance was equal, but separate. — Nell Zink
As a writer, she was struggling. As an accomplice to the wholesale drug trade, she was setting new benchmarks for excellence in felony crime. The — Nell Zink
So many men, so little parking. — Nell Zink
I wanted to hear my own whispers in the next room and know that I was thinking of me. — Nell Zink
He informed Byrdie that his social engineering ambitions betrayed all the delusions of grandeur that you might expect from the son of a poet. — Nell Zink
Human beings are just way more complex than they'd like to be. They like to be simple machines. And they'll set up fantasy scenarios where they're simple machines, and get hurt and do things they regret. — Nell Zink
...the whole universe is contagious if you look at it long enough. Just opening your eyes puts you in front of a mirror, psychologically speaking. Garbage in, garbage out. Or rather, garbage goes in, but you never get rid of it. It just lies there turning to dust and slowly wafting a thin layer of grime on to every other object in your brain. Scraping the gunk off is not only a major challenge, but the chief burden of human existence. that's why I keep things so clean. Otherwise I would see little flecks of [ ] shit everywhere I looked ... — Nell Zink
I had to do something, because the minute I broke up with Elvis, I fell in love with him. — Nell Zink
You can ascend to the region of blue sky and great wandering shadows. The shelter that received the risen Christ and Port in The Sheltering Sky, that comforted the mortally wounded Prince Andrei and the young W. E. B. Du Bois. — Nell Zink
It's a digital e-cigarette." "What's digital about it?" "You hold it in your fingers, like this." "I'm serious. Is it part of the Internet of things? Do they know when you're smoking it?" "I don't think so. I think they just mean it works on electricity. — Nell Zink
She had read enough lives of the poetesses to know all about inpatient psychiatric care. — Nell Zink
then decided maybe something was wrong with Sundays. He tried Saturday and saw about two thousand — Nell Zink
As I was to learn, reproductive urges will serve as an alibi for just about anything. — Nell Zink
I'm enough of an anarchist aesthetically, when it comes to art - I want people to be reading my stuff voluntarily. They should be doing it because they want to. — Nell Zink
She would see that in England, for reasons unknown, a woman can simultaneously be cute as a bug's ear, a serious rose gardener, and a nymphomaniac. — Nell Zink
People wanted to get me published, and my early work was so weird that they weren't getting anywhere. I thought, okay, I'll do something that's just a tad more normal. — Nell Zink
And the black box in her arms whimpered itself to sleep with longing to be a normal person who is chosen, not a special person who is discovered. To be the kind of duck who gets included by wild swans — Nell Zink
I have known many people who were seduced as children by same-sex partners and then spent their teen years being gay, and then found their way back to heterosexuality as adults. — Nell Zink
The library, like the thrift shop, specialised in the leavings of the elderly dead. — Nell Zink
You're a cis-het dude-bro on strike for better conditions. — Nell Zink
Over milk and cookies after Karen's return, she confessed to Karen that she had no idea what Karen wanted out of life. "You're a cipher," she said. "A mystery. What are your ambitions and desires? When I was your age, I wanted to write plays." "I want to get good grades and go to college." "And what are you going to do when you get there?" "How would I know? I need to get there first and see what it's like. There are all these majors that sound neat, but I don't know what they are. Like 'sociology.' What is it? — Nell Zink
Peggy had not forgotten the intellectual and social ambitions she had started life with only a decade before. Years so weary and routine laden, they seemed like a single year that had repeated itself. She wanted to be creative and self-reliant. — Nell Zink
It was a pastiche of public library porn from Irving Stone to Philip Roth. — Nell Zink
Meg felt her heart constrict. There was so much she wanted to say to him. Things any normal mother would say, like that a one-handed backhand is more versatile. — Nell Zink
They should build a monument," Cary said. "All the times I got my ass beat to a pulp so the youth of today could get dolled up like faggots to go out in public. — Nell Zink
Why shouldn't loving puppets be a revolutionary act, in a world where so many people love drone warfare? — Nell Zink
You could take winos off the sidewalk in front of the drugstore and teach them to be poets in half an hour. — Nell Zink
From the passenger seat the wallcreeper said, "Twee. — Nell Zink
There are terrible things that never get easier, and there are things even more terrible that get easier with time and repetition. — Nell Zink
I saw that I had followed the chief guiding principle of the petty bourgeoisie in modernity and made a virtue of necessity in telling myself my husband was a good lover. — Nell Zink
As a speller he was adrift in a no-man's-land between phonetic and dyslexic. — Nell Zink