Vanessa Veselka Quotes & Sayings

But I know what it means to crave what you're not. To want to sew up that rift because it's exhausting to hold it open. Sometimes you just need to be someone else, someone who doesn't care about anything at all. I know I do. I want emptiness but I can't have it. — Vanessa Veselka

Siddhartha wants liberation, Dante wants Beatrice, Frodo wants to get to Mount Doom - we all want something. Quest is elemental to the human experience. All road narratives are to some extent built on quest. If you're a woman, though, this fundamental possibility of quest is denied. You can't go anywhere if you can't step out onto a road ...
... (T)here is no female counterpart in our culture to Ishmael or Huck Finn. There is no Dean Moriarty, Sal, or even a Fuckhead. It sounds like a doctoral crisis, but it's not. As a fifteen-year-old hitchhiker, my survival depended upon other people's ability to envision a possible future for me. Without a Melvillean or Kerouacian framework, or at least some kind of narrative to spell out a potential beyond death, none of my resourcefulness or curiosity was recognizable, and therefore I was unrecognizable. — Vanessa Veselka

I was not afraid of horror, I was afraid of beauty, of what it could do to me if I let it. — Vanessa Veselka

The world is a violent child none of us will get to see grow up. — Vanessa Veselka

Some things are so sad that they have no name. I have tried to name them and I can't. — Vanessa Veselka

I tried to map the cultural trends leading up to it but as I did they grew, interconnecting and weaving backwards and sideways out to everything. Next to the megalithic institutionalized shredding of people's humanity, marked by tombstone malls and scabby hills, the Styrofoam gullets and flag-waving god-chatterers casting their votes for eternal paternity on the lap rapists - next to all of that, the intimacy between a terrorist and his target was almost a beautiful thing but I still couldn't solve that moment when they did it anyway so I grabbed more paper and widened my field of vision. — Vanessa Veselka

I felt my pride like a prison. — Vanessa Veselka

Britta wanted to try to turn a guard. Tamara thought it was idiotic.
"What are you going to do? Buy him beer and tell him about Kropotkin?"
I envisioned the conversation:
Vanguard: Wage Slave, are you aware that you are but a wire nail in the toolbox of capitalism?
Wage Slave: I thought I was a chisel.
Vanguard: No, the petit bourgeois are the chisels.
Wage Slave: What about a washer set? Can I be a washer set?
Vanguard: No, my ferret, run free! For I have unlocked your collar with knowledge!
Wage Slave: I want to be a chisel.
Vanguard pushes screaming ferret through hole in fence cut by the clippers of noblesse oblige.
"Well, maybe we could bribe him," said Britta. Tamara laughed.
"With what? Health insurance? — Vanessa Veselka

Because that's the way it is when a possibility opens up; the body doesn't know any better. It reaches for the glittering incongruity. — Vanessa Veselka

I paid my bill. Save your fucking pennies for a gun and a history book ... — Vanessa Veselka

I looked at the woman crying over the doll and felt something else. I was sick of people acting against their own interests. Mooing about how to refinance the slaughterhouse. Putting skylights in the killing pen and pretending the bolt in the brain was a pathway to a better field. I paid my bill. Save your fucking pennies for a gun and a history book, I thought. — Vanessa Veselka

The equation Bubble Tea = Something to Look Forward To depressurizes the misery of capitalism and is a Hello Kitty band-aid on the festering wound of Neo-Liberalism. — Vanessa Veselka

You could always industrialize," she refilled Jimmy's wine glass. "You know, get a job stunning chickens in a factory to earn the trust of the working class." Jimmy laughed again and accidentally spat Chablis on my legs. "It's a pretty silly idea, isn't it?" said Grace, getting a rag. "Leaping out of the closet in a crisis?" She lowered her voice, "Don't worry, sir. I'm a revolutionary socialist. Everything's going to be okay. — Vanessa Veselka

I looked around at the smoke and people. I couldn't find any hate in me anywhere. The world is a violent child none of us will get to see grow up. I decided to love it anyway. — Vanessa Veselka

I like to think of myself as a coworker with lots of experience rather than a boss, Franklin said.
I like to think of myself as a boss more than a slave but mostly I prefer to not think about it at all because when I think about it, I can't stop. — Vanessa Veselka

The gentle rustle of armies crawling the planet like ants. Anybody with any sense knows what's coming. — Vanessa Veselka

Oh, you must be part of the underground no one's ever heard about."
"I don't belong to any group outside of my friends."
"That's a real bridge builder."
But it was a pretty hollow response. I wasn't part of any group either, and not just because my wiring was shot and I cried all the time, but because I had never met anyone in any political organization that I liked. — Vanessa Veselka

I would love to love something, especially if I could do it without feeling like I was watching it die right in front of me. — Vanessa Veselka