Nicole Brossard Quotes & Sayings

Kathy Kerouac knew the power of her voice. It was, she said, her 'golden thing,' an amulet protecting her against all disorders of the spirit. Her voice was a charm that could stop violence and transform crudeness into curtesy, foolishness into finesse. So Kathy Kerouac was under the impression that nothing was ever altogether dangerous, the feeling that no word spoken could soil her world. — Nicole Brossard

If patriarchy can take what exists and make it not, surely we can take what exists and make it be. — Nicole Brossard

Then I stop existing. She is talking, talking, takes off who knows where, she says it all starts over, speech, paths, butterflies and that she just loves words' inevitable slowness, she says that when in distress everything is overcome by the sound of words and that everything then becomes impossible to understand, she says things are exploding in her head and that everything must be attempted again like a backhand, a lob in mindspace, she repeats the mind is fragile but the eyes, but the eyes Melanie, she says one must not give up, that nothing is impossible if in the realm of the improbable memory realises the certitude which in us keeps an eye out for beauty on the horizon, she talks about our attachment to certain words, that they are like small slow deaths in concise reality. — Nicole Brossard

Language is magic: it makes things appear and disappear. — Nicole Brossard

Loving a woman is always political. — Nicole Brossard

The text moves like a small crustacean with compound eye and complex nervous system; throbbing, involuted, it becomes a parasite on a different body, animal, using 'filiform protrusions through which it sucks the vital juices of its host.' Parasite or creature in mutation on the shore, torrid / delirium: mordant mortality, systematic competition the narrator against the I, leaking gas, a lapse of memory against a promise, an inset in a book. A muscular, involuntary bulging in the breast, circling all its inner surface: mesoblast: visceral. — Nicole Brossard

Poetry, I'm returning to it, never leaves me. It's my genre completely. In poetry I contemplate myself exuberantly. It's my unique strength. Force of gravity, electric and magnetic energy; in my own way, to make a synthesis. — Nicole Brossard

More and more I love darkness for itself, it soothes me, makes me feel good, though I don't quite understand why. I also love it because I am trying to imagine language without light, as though I wanted to understand how things were before language, when, deep in the throat, syllables and vowels were not yet organized and it was necessary to tilt one's head back to allow sounds to fly through the open air, terrifying, guttural or strident. In the beginning, I thought the other language would enlighten me, clarify the mysteries of my inner life. I wanted to learn to read inside myself. Reading inside oneself may not be important. — Nicole Brossard

Women laugh in such ways that we can't see the fences in their breathing — Nicole Brossard

To be a poet is to place pleasure, beauty and sensual delights front and centre, it means having a predilection for debauchery. — Nicole Brossard

Opening and closing the pages of a celestial dictionary at will and always falling upon the words hair fur and sex until a bunch of distant images arise at the same time as June when she kneels in front of me her tongue making little cross-strokes in my full-moon fur my enchanted-lake fur we should do it again so that I too can stroke through June's fur. — Nicole Brossard

The lesbian is a threatening reality for reality. — Nicole Brossard

A lesbian is a radical or she is not a lesbian. — Nicole Brossard

A wish: to abolish walls between mouths. Mm-mmm the taste of it. Luckily keeps flowing in the text and on my tongue, erotic substitutes, and luckily that tipsy feeling in the dark, inside beside a cheek so just enjoy, rejoice in the juice, turn and return to that first excitement. What is excitement? Encouragement to do what you feel like doing when seen by someone else / the reader in company with Lucy, Georges or Alexandre, or Elle; being used to spinning out one's dreams by muddling one's own reflection in the mirror so marvellously that paradoxes come to life and whatever the cost force a retake of the sentences, the caresses that started the excitement (what did we say it was?), stimulated spine and breasts dandled in a hand, a phallus emerged invitation to oblivion, to the feel of rhythmic shudder, loins more titillating than some corny happy-ever-after tale, pelvic basins the pornographic mudholes of one's imagination. Narrator fem. / masc. Pelvic basins liquid base. — Nicole Brossard

I cannot get close to any you. — Nicole Brossard

He says tools but somebody will mention the cutting edges of things and one will see billhook, scythe, fauchard, debris, wood chips and sketches all entangled like words in summertime, when crickets and corn, lives and vines, sunflowers and stormy hours touch and quench one another. — Nicole Brossard

Lesbians are the poets of the humanity of women ... — Nicole Brossard

When two words are identical, you must not take undue offence or think you have been wronged in terms of choice. Simplicity is a fine patience of meaning. — Nicole Brossard

she wanted because art — Nicole Brossard

Since I've been rereading this book I'm anchored at point zero, considering a thousand strategies and points of view which soon dissolve, abstraction, abstraction, the gaze melts. — Nicole Brossard

all adventures involving knowledge and imagination. When Marielle drives crosstown from east to west along Sherbrooke Street in her old Plymouth, aka 'Violet,' it is 'a carousel of history and geography,' it is about straddling grammar and going off to explore the inner recesses of the images and life irrigating the brain. — Nicole Brossard

Writing is a consciousness formally at work in the territory of the imaginary. — Nicole Brossard

The lesbian is a mental energy which gives breath and meaning to the most positive of images a woman can have of herself. — Nicole Brossard

To write, you must first belong to yourself. — Nicole Brossard

I was fifteen and with every ounce of my strength I was leaning into my thoughts to make them slant reality toward the light. — Nicole Brossard

Yet the voice could take fright. This Kathy Kerouac foresaw only too well when syllables suddenly started coming out of her mouth like little fragments of oblivion giving her the impression she was contradicting herself. It was in these moments, when words were both true and false, solemn and light, on the tip of her tongue and deep in the throat, that space shrank in her mouth like a hard-felt blow. — Nicole Brossard

A lesbian who does not reinvent the world is a lesbian in the process of disappearing. — Nicole Brossard