Patricia Duncker Quotes & Sayings

I stared at the changing patterns on the back of his white shirt as he moved under the trees. — Patricia Duncker

But ... if it's so awful and difficult who not try to become a group? Be accepted?
He glittered at me for a moment, then said, I would rather be mad. — Patricia Duncker

And that is the loneliness of seeing a different world from that of the people around you. Their lives remain remote from yours. You can see the gulf and they can't. — Patricia Duncker

All writers are, somewhere or other, mad. Not les grands fous, like Rimbaud, but mad, yes, mad. Because we do not believe in the stability of reality. We know that it can fragment, like a sheet of glass or a car's windscreen. but we also know that reality can be invented, reordered, constructed, remade. Writing is, in itself, an act of violence perpetrated against reality. — Patricia Duncker

Suddenly, she employed those very English weapons: devious good manners and a rapid change of subject. — Patricia Duncker

The love between writer and a reader is never celebrated. It can never be proved to exist. But he was the man I loved most. He was the reader for whom I wrote.
That's what my writing was. Messages in bottles. — Patricia Duncker

We articulate our fears, like children in the dark, giving them names in order to tame them. — Patricia Duncker

You can say anything, anything, if it is beautifully said. — Patricia Duncker

You write your first novel with the desperation of the damned. You're afraid that you'll never write anything else, ever again. — Patricia Duncker

They were from different generations, culture, nations. But even these things did not divide them so much as their separate conceptions of what it meant to be a woman. — Patricia Duncker

Well
there are two kinds of loneliness, aren't there? There's the loneliness of absolute solitude
the physical fact of living alone, working alone, as I have always done. This need not be painful. For many writers it's necessary. Others need a female staff of family servants to type their bloody books and keep the their egos afloat. Being alone for most of the day means that you listen to different rhythms, which are not determined by other people. I think it's better so. But there is another kind of loneliness which is terrible to endure ... And that is the loneliness of seeing a different world from that of the people around you. Their lives remain remote from yours. You can see the gulf and they can't. You live among them. They walk on earth. You walk on glass. They reassure themselves with conformity, with carefully constructed resemblances. You are masked, aware of your absolute difference. — Patricia Duncker

Freedom: both so priceless and so expensive. — Patricia Duncker

The love between a writer and a reader is never celebrated. — Patricia Duncker

Madness and passion have always been interchangeable. Throughout the entire western literary tradition. Madness is an abundance of existence. Madness is a way of asking difficult questions. What did he mean, the powerless tyrant king? O Fool, I shall go mad.
Maybe madness is the excess of possibility, ... And writingis about reducing possibility to ne idea, one book, one sentence, one word. Madness is a form of self-expression. It is the opposite of creativity. You cannot make anything that can be separated from yourself if you are mad. And yet, look at Rimbaud
and your wonderful Christopher Smart. But don't harbour any romantic ideas about what it means to be mad. My language was my protection, my guarantee against madness and when there was no one to listen my language vanished along with my reader. — Patricia Duncker

Love is not feeling, child, nor even the passion of lovers, which always seeks only its own gratification. It is the act of caring, of giving, the act of protecting the weak, the helpless, the imprisoned and the desperate. Love is the hand raised in defence. You cannot love and keep your hands clean. — Patricia Duncker