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

I mark my years or parenting by the people who stepped in and forced me to abandon my inclination to meddle, micromanage, and coddle, beginning with my children's father, who sat me down and told me in year two that I was going to create a little monster if I continuted to act as though "no" and "I don't love you" were synonomous. — Anna Quindlen

All I do know, for certain, after 53 years in this business, is that writers who sincerely think that their language can represent reality ought to be plumbers. — Gilbert Sorrentino

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

We are not rational animals; we are rationalizing animals. — Hugh Howey

Loving a woman is always political. — Nicole Brossard

By the 1980's and 1990's, Moore's Law had emerged as the underlying assumption that governed almost everything in the Valley, from technology to business, education, and even culture. The "law" said the number of transistors would double every couple of years. It dictated that nothing stays the same for more than a moment; no technology is safe from its successor; costs fall and computing power increases not at a constant rate but exponentially: If you're not running on what became known as " Internet time," you're falling behind. — John Markoff

While he was doing it, I went over to my window and opened it and packed a snowball with my bare hands. The snow was very good for packing. I didn't throw it at anything, though. I started to throw it. At a car that was parked across the street. But I changed my mind. The car looked so nice and white. Then I started to throw it at a hydrant, but that looked too nice and white, too. Finally I didn't throw it at anything. All I did was close the window and walk around the room with the snowball, packing it harder. A little while later, I still had it with me when I and Brossard and Ackley got on the bus. The bus driver opened the doors and made me throw it out. I wasn't going to chuck it at anybody, but he wouldn't believe me. People never believe you. — J.D. Salinger

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

I take it that it is best for all to leave each man free to acquire property as fast as he can. Some will get wealthy. I dont believe in a law to prevent a man from getting rich; it would do more harm than good. — Abraham Lincoln

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

I cannot get close to any you. — 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

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

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

I ain't never seen a creature like that before, she says. He's so smart, he's-
More, like a person than a bird? I says.
Yeah, she says. That's it.
Whatever you do, I says, don't tell him that. I'll never hear the end of it. — Moira Young

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In meditation we can watch the itch instead of scratching it. — Ram Dass

You don't beat the grim reaper by living longer; you beat the grim reaper by living better. — Randy Pausch

Stupidity is the prerogative of the wealthy. Pauper's field is crammed with smart guys. — Chandler Brossard

It's something you can actually control. With writing, it feels like it's given to you, and when the good stuff hits, it feels like it's coming from some other planet.And you're just channeling it. — Donald Miller