Patricia Lockwood Quotes & Sayings

How do god fit him ass in them jeans when he is, in fact, Everywhere — Patricia Lockwood

Dads didn't care about lightning, because lightning was on the cover of all their favorite albums. Sometimes it was painted on their trucks as well. You could tell that if their kids were killed by lightning, they would be sad, but they would also feel superior about it for the rest of their lives, because it was without question the most hard-as way for a child to die. "My son Randy . . ." they would say, their voices trailing, "taken from us by pure electricity in the year Nineteen Hundred and Ninety . . . — Patricia Lockwood

We worshipped a great white body that was an avalanche of good news, and we slit it open in every part. "That can't go through the mail," the postman gasped, "because that is a super-stabbed body!" The super-stabbed body rose up, with many butterknives sticking out of it, and said, "I AM the mail." It had so many lovers. — Patricia Lockwood

I tweet when the tweet arrives. Never force a tweet or you will hurt your babymaker - and this is true of literature as well. — Patricia Lockwood

There's no law against a sentence existing in two places at once, unlike humans, who are no longer allowed to bilocate because it confuses the cops too much. — Patricia Lockwood

Sometimes I have thought I was lonely and it turned out I was in reality wanting a snack, just like sometimes I have thought I was mad and it turned out I was actually wearing too many sweaters. — Patricia Lockwood

Whenever someone says the word "month" to me, I call up an empty square filled with other empty squares, days, and hours and minutes, bricks on bricks spiraling inward, pinwheel and diamond, and herringbone patterns marching smaller and smaller to some vanishing point. — Patricia Lockwood

I'm not interested in heaven unless my anger gets to go there too. I'm not interested in a happy eternity unless I get to spend an eternity on anger first. Let me speak for the meek and say that we don't want the earth, if that's where all the bodies are buried. If we are resurrected at the end of the world, I want us to assemble with a military click, I want us to come together as an army against what happened to us here. I want us to bring down the enemy of our suffering once and for all, and I want us to loot the pockets, and I want us to take baths in the blood. — Patricia Lockwood

I simply ate a fish-head, but fish-heads won't fill
me now. Your attention is a fish-head,
so throw it back into my new body, back
into the body climbing the stairs. — Patricia Lockwood

All my life I have overheard, all my life I have listened to what people will let slip when they think you are part of their we. A we is so powerful. It is the most corrupt and formidable institution on earth. Its hands are full of the crispest and most persuasive currency. Its mouth is full of received, repeating language. The we closes its ranks to protect the space inside it, where the air is different. It does not protect people. It protects its own shape. — Patricia Lockwood

Above all else, he loves trilogies. There has never been a trilogy he didn't like, and if you don't understand why, I have three words for you: father, son, and Holy Spirit. Foremost among his favorites is the original Star Wars trilogy, which he fervently believes is about priests in space, and the first three Alien films, which he believes are about how all women are destined to be mothers. Currently he is obsessed with the Transformers movies, because the greatest Transformer of all . . . is Jesus Christ. He even sat me down one day to have a serious discussion about "moral choices the Transformers are forced to make." At no point did I interrupt him to say, "But Dad, they're cars." This means I am becoming an adult. Because truly, the Transformers are more than cars. Some of them are trucks. — Patricia Lockwood

As they perform this ritual, I almost have to turn away, thinking again what a boomeranging, out-of-body experience it is to watch a religious childhood from the outside, when before I was in the very marrow of it. — Patricia Lockwood

I fuckin eat silence of crickets for fun. I got life after
life and a name like Baby. Every time I try to cry a tear
a new kittenhead grows out of me. — Patricia Lockwood

First tweet, best tweet, I always think. I try not to work them too much or else they get Pie Dough Disease, which is where the dough has been to too much college and doesn't understand that it is dough anymore and refuses to be shaped. Pie Dough Disease! Poems get that too. — Patricia Lockwood

He clenched his small fist, bellowed his rage to the heavens, and resolved to never again recognize the authority of any man on earth. — Patricia Lockwood

Part of what you have to figure out in this life is, Who would I be if I hadn't been frightened? What hurt me, and what would I be if it hadn't? Next — Patricia Lockwood

Most letters were love letters until they were not. — Patricia Lockwood

The half of her that is underwater would like to be
under a desk, the head of her that is underwater
would like to be fully immersed. — Patricia Lockwood

See men for miles around give nature what she needs,
rivers and rivers and rivers of it. You exhale with perfect
happiness. Nature turned you down in high school.
Now you can come in her eye. — Patricia Lockwood