Lia Block Quotes & Sayings

Wish on everything. Pink cars are good, especially old ones. And stars of course, first stars and shooting stars. Planes will do if they are the first light in the sky and look like stars. Wish in tunnels, holding your breath and lifting your feet off the ground. Birthday candles. Baby teeth. — Francesca Lia Block

Under the ground seep the toxins of the population that lives above. If you have to, you will eat roots and earthworms. It is always night. Candles burn in lanterns made from tin cans. When it is nighttime up above, you can crawl out, but only for a little while. You feel ashamed of your matted hair, your torn clothes, the dirt on your face. Who would want to speak to you? They are all shiny and pretty. They have parents and house with gardens. What do you have? The earth. Whole handfuls of it. The lizard people with their slit eyes and scaly skin. Your loneliness. Your longing. — Francesca Lia Block

He might be faithless but I believe in him. — Francesca Lia Block

There's nowhere to escape," Dobey said, jamming his hands into his pockets and staring into the Valley.
That's not true, baby," said Desiree.
She took his hands and pulled him to her, wrapping her legs around his torso. She could feel the sobs in both of them, but quiet, silenced by the kiss.
They could escape inside each other. — Francesca Lia Block

Nothing happened. And everything did. Your whole life you can be told something is wrong and so you believe it. Why should you question it? But then slowly seeds are planted inside of you, one by one, by a touch or a look or a day skateboarding in a park, and they start to burst out of old hulls shells and they start to sprout. And pretty soon there are so many of them. They are named Love and Trust and Kindness and Joy and Desire and Wonder and Spirit and Soulmate. They grow into a garden so dense and thick that it starts to invade your brain where the old things you were once told are dying. — Francesca Lia Block

We are all insane. But how do you distinguish sanity from insanity, how do you diagnose abnormality in this new world? — Francesca Lia Block

In order to have bliss you have to be able to accept all the parts of the other, all the wildness and the darkness. You have to be able to hold on. — Francesca Lia Block

I could see the veins through your skin like a map to inside you. how could skin be that thin? i was so afraid you might drop and break. i stopped breathing so you wouldn't. — Francesca Lia Block

You are so intense. Like a storm. It's shocking how intense you are. — Francesca Lia Block

Pain didn't ever really stop, he thought; it just changed forms. — Francesca Lia Block

He was so handsome,but he didn't look well.He reminded her of a cigarette. — Francesca Lia Block

I was staring to learn how to forget the things that made me sad. It was like a charm you followed step-by-step, collecting and blending the ingredients, placing everything in its proper place, reciting the incantation. It was the magic of forgetting. — Francesca Lia Block

I climb through the rubble toward the door. It takes a long time, time enough for a Giant to see me from the blood-red stained-glass eye window and reach out to crush me in his hand the size of a tractor. — Francesca Lia Block

No matter how bad things get, you can always see the beauty in them. The worse things get, the more you have to make yourself see the magic in order to survive. — Francesca Lia Block

At the next Goat Guys show, the band came on stage with their wings, their haunches, their horns. The audience swooned at their feet.
Cherokee spun and spun until she was dizzy, until she was not sure anymore if she or the stage was in motion.
Afterwards two girls in lingerie and over-the-knee leather boots offered a joint to Raphael and Angel Juan. All four of them were smoking backstage when Cherokee and Witch Baby came through the door.
Witch Baby went and wriggled onto Angel Juan's lap. He was wearing the horns and massaging his temples. His face looked constricted with pain until he inhaled the smoke from the joint.
"Are you okay?" Witch Baby asked.
"My head's killing me. — Francesca Lia Block

Barbie was no longer afraid of anything. It was like the thing Mab had said about belief. The belief is sometimes the biggest part of it all. You can choose to believe in your published book being held in the loving hands of strangers, your name tattooed forever on the heart of the one you adore; you can choose to believe in tiny red-haired pesky piskies--all the things 'they' may tell you not to believe in. But who are they anyway? What do they know? What makes them any more real? — Francesca Lia Block

Maybe her own tears were the poison that made her grow. — Francesca Lia Block

The world isn't necessarily going to explode. There will just be vast change. There is hope. It is in the rain forests, the healing plants from there, and in sex and the children who are being born. They have different strains of DNA. They aren't really humans. So they will make the difference. — Francesca Lia Block

But death is stronger than that and when you cover your eyes you are the one who can't see the dark. The dark still sees you. — Francesca Lia Block

Even in darkness your lips taste of sunshine — Francesca Lia Block

Ugster vinyl pumps, Partridge Family records, plastic daisy jewelry, old postcards ... It's a magpie Christmas market. — Francesca Lia Block

You make me feel like I have wings when you touch me. — Francesca Lia Block

I close my eyes. I am the visionary, the one-eyed seer, the storyteller. I am Pen. I can fight with the power of images and words. — Francesca Lia Block

People worry so much. Just enjoy your body. That you can love. And you're alive. — Francesca Lia Block

Let's not be afraid of anything that can't really hurt us. — Francesca Lia Block

At first we raced through space, like shadows and light; her rants, my raves; her dark hair, my blonde; black dresses, white. She's a purple-black African-violet-dark butterfly and I a white moth. We were two wild ponies, Dawn and Midnight, the wind electrifying our manes and our hooves quaking the city; we were photo negatives of each other, together making the perfect image of a girl. — Francesca Lia Block

I didn't tell him that what I was most scared of, most haunted by, was something I didn't understand and could never run away from. It was myself. — Francesca Lia Block

Okay. I wish for world peace," Weetzie said. "I am sorry," the genie said. "I cant grant that wish. Its out of my league." "Then I wish for an infinite number of wishes!" Those people on fairy tales never thought of that. "People in fairy tales wish for that all the time," the genie said. "They arent stupid. It just isnt in the records because I cant grant that type of wish. — Francesca Lia Block

Pulling heads off Barbies, sticking them on the TV antenna and ruining the reception. But thats how witch babies are. — Francesca Lia Block

It was always a relief when she came home to him. Like water or food. Like music or that moment when you cut yourself with a knife and squeeze the skin and no blood oozes out. — Francesca Lia Block

My love wants to change the world
she thinks she has so much to give
not realizing how much she takes from others
my love is loyal until she senses rejection of any kind
then she flies like a bird but has less memory
of where she came from
i would like to protect you from my love — Francesca Lia Block

What shall we do, all of us? All of us oassionate girls who fear crushing the boys we love with our mouths like caverns of teeth, our mushrooming brains, our watermelon hearts? — Francesca Lia Block

I am constantly thinking ahead to what I want to write about in the future, and when I'm done with one project, I give myself a little time and then start the next one. — Francesca Lia Block

I dreamed you were standing in this dark place and you touched these dead flowers and they lit up like they were electric or something. Electric lilies. Lighting up the Valley. — Francesca Lia Block

I think that poetry is perfect for women raising children, with just bits of time and such need to connect to other women out of the isolation of motherhood. — Francesca Lia Block

This was not a fearie tale. This was not the movies. This was life. It hurt more. It was excruciating. It was excruciatingly beautiful. — Francesca Lia Block

Why else were we here except to love? — Francesca Lia Block

She was no longer a slow dreamer watching the flowers grow. She was a warrior now. Warriors need something to fight for though, beside their lives, because otherwise their lives will not be worth it. — Francesca Lia Block

Weetzie and My Secret Agent Lover Man and Dirk and Duck and Cherokee and Witch Baby and Slinkster Dog and Go-Go Girl and the puppies Pee Wee, Wee Wee, Teenie Wee, Tiki Tee, and Tee Pee were driving down Hollywood Boulevard on their way to the Tick Tock Tea Room for turkey platters. — Francesca Lia Block

Yes, the Beast changed.
He spoke more now, and did not gaze at Beauty in the same intense, almost pained way, as if he were feeling every emotion she felt. He did not sigh in his sleep when she sighed and his stomach didn't growl when hers hurt. He could not read her thoughts anymore, and she could not read his. He seemed a bit more clumsy and guarded and distant, too. They no longer ran through the woods together, although they still walked there sometimes. They quarreled and raised their voices to each other once in a while. Each time, after they quarreled, Beauty bathed, combed the tangles from her hair, and began to wear shoes again for a few days. — Francesca Lia Block

My mother says that pain is hidden in everyone you see. She says try to imagine it like big bunches of flowers that everyone is carrying around with them. Think of your pain like a big bunch of red roses, a beautiful thorn necklace. Everyone has one. — Francesca Lia Block

When I went back to look for it again I could never find it. It was as if someone had put some kind of glamour, some kind of spell, on that ground, and I felt as if I was walking in circles around it again and again, never able to see what was in front of my eyes.
That was how I felt about what happened to me when I turned thirteen. I felt as if I was always circling around my own brain trying to understand. — Francesca Lia Block

Being a good mother is being a hero. Right? — Francesca Lia Block

She had changed him. The ice was in his eyes and in his heart, like he had predicted with that song, but now they were deep embedded there, all the pain of the world. Not pain to make you feel for somebody else but pain to make you stop feeling. — Francesca Lia Block

He slid his hands around behind me and placed his fingers on my shoulder blades, touching the bones reverently, as if he had discovered wings. — Francesca Lia Block

Any alphabet book for children where 'P is for Patti' Smith and 'X is for the women whose names we don't know' is something I can recommend, especially when the book is as well written, representationa lly diverse and vividly illustrated as this one. — Francesca Lia Block

The lesson of this life is not for me to touch you again. It is to accept who I am now and not feel shame. — Francesca Lia Block

Our eyelashes brushed like they would weave together by themselves, turning us into one wild thing. I say, I think I missed you before I met you even. — Francesca Lia Block

What are you going to do if you find art, Pen? You going to steal some and put it in the van?"
"I'm going to remember. When there was art. — Francesca Lia Block

But be careful; sand is already broken but glass breaks. The shoes are for dancing, not running away. — Francesca Lia Block

No matter where I am, I am always loving you. — Francesca Lia Block

On the way to Santa Cruz Dirk and Duck stopped along the coast to surf. They stopped so many times to surf and eat (they finished the avocado sandwiches in the first fifteen minutes and bought sunflower seeds, licorice, peaches, and Foster's Freeze soft ice cream along the way) that they didn't get to Santa Cruz until late that night. — Francesca Lia Block

Pain can give you sight or make you blind. — Francesca Lia Block

I wrote poetry from the time I could write. That was the only way I could begin to express who I was but the poems didn't make sense to my teachers. They didn't rhyme. They were about the wind sounds, the planets' motions, never about who I was or how I felt. I didn't think I felt anything. I was this mind more than a body or a heart. My mind photographing the stars, hearing the wind. — Francesca Lia Block

If you were sad about something that hadn't happened yet you couldn't be disappointed. — Francesca Lia Block

Sometimes she has imagined what it would be like to fly, to live in the river, to run like a horse. She has dreamed of that freedom, that power, and fears the wildness in herself that wants to live as beasts live, moved purely by need and desire. She has felt torn between the heat of her limbs and the thoughts in her mind telling her to be careful and good and always calm.
Don't scream or cry, don't run to him and throw yourself at his feet, pleading for him to take you in his arms, don't strip off your clothes and run naked to the water, wild with wanting. — Francesca Lia Block

love is the only thing we have to save us — Francesca Lia Block

Any love that is love is right. — Francesca Lia Block

It was like when we were little kids and we played games on the ivy-covered hillside in the backyard. We were warriors and wizards and angels and high elves and that was our reality. If someone said, Isn't it cute, look at them playing, we would have smiled back, humoring them, but it wasn't playing. It was transformation. It was our own world. Our own rules. — Francesca Lia Block

Write with abandon and no constraints for first draft. Cut brutally and save in separate files on second draft. Add conflict; don't be afraid to make your characters suffer. Read what you love. Write what you love. Love. — Francesca Lia Block

When you look at pain as material it makes all the difference in the world. I thought, the pain that is too big to be eased by its use as material would be a pain I couldn't (and wouldn't want to) even imagine. — Francesca Lia Block

I will not eat cakes or cookies or food. I will be thin, thin, pure. I will be pure and empty. Weight dropping off. Ninety-nine ... ninety-five ... ninety-two ... ninety. Just one more to eighty-nine. Where does it go? Where in the universe does it go? — Francesca Lia Block

In Mexico people wear hummingbird amulets around their necks to show they are searching for love. Here people pretend that they aren't. Searching. — Francesca Lia Block

Once she was standing by her locker and her puka shells broke and scattered and she made a joke about it but he could tell she was upset. He wanted to buy her some more. He wanted to give her a million strands of little nesting polished shells, and tropical flowers and ice creams and lemonades and a pale blue surfboard to teach her to surf on and anything else she wanted. Instead he let his checkered Vans step on one of the rolling shells and crush it. — Francesca Lia Block

Everything was fine, but Weetzie wanted a baby. "How could you want one?" My Secret Agent Lover Man said. "There are way too many babies. And diseases. And nuclear accidents. And crazy psychos. We cant have a baby," he said. — Francesca Lia Block

Relieved because what I dreaded most in the whole world was going to happen and I wouldn't have to live with it anymore - the fear.
There is the relief of finally not being alone and the relief of being alone when no one can take anything away from you. Here she was, my beautiful fear. Shiny as crystal lace frost. — Francesca Lia Block

Just like any woman, ... we weave our stories out of our bodies. Some of us through our children, or our art; some do it just by living. It's all the same. — Francesca Lia Block

Same Bat time, same Bat place. — Francesca Lia Block

You are my Marilyn. You are my lake full of fishes. You are my sky set, my 'Hollywood in Miniature,' my pink Cadillac, my highway, my martini, the stage for my heart to rock and roll on, the screen where my movies light up. — Francesca Lia Block

Take my eye," I say. "I have another. — Francesca Lia Block

When you live in a city with no stars to wish on, you have to wish on each other. — Francesca Lia Block

Pianos, unlike people, sing when you give them your every growl. They know how to dive into the pit of your stomach and harmonize with your roars when you've split yourself open. And when they see you, guts shining, brain pulsing, heart right there exposed in a rhythm that beats need need, need need, need need, pianos do not run. And so she plays. — Francesca Lia Block

Here you go on this long long dream. Don't even try to wake up. Just let it go on until it is over. You will learn many things. Just relax and observe because there is pain and that's it mostly and you aren't going to be able to escape no matter what. Eventually it will all be over anyway. Good luck. — Francesca Lia Block

Magic can be found in stolen moments. — Francesca Lia Block

The circus tent was flowing pale in the rain like a fleshy flower lit from within. It seemed to bloom in the downpour. Drops of rain caught on Rafe's eyelashes, blinding him as the circus light struck them. He groped for the flap, that slit in the fabric that would reveal her to him.
She was on the rope again, her skirt flashing with tiny mirrors, hair braided with petals. He looked up at her, dizzy with it, seeing her face framed in the parasol. There were bluish shadows around her eyes. — Francesca Lia Block

What time are we upon and where do I belong? — Francesca Lia Block

Besides, secretly, without knowing it herself, she had been waiting for a Beast to go to. — Francesca Lia Block

If you made up a city like this, no one would have believed you. It seemed more like myth than reality- a whole metropolis built up around an industry that recorded dreams on giant screens, a city bordered by an ocean and a desert and snowcapped mountains. And right through the urban sprawl were canyons full of flowers, wild animals and secrets. — Francesca Lia Block

You can't doubt so much, Psyche — Francesca Lia Block

Morning. Strawberry sky dusted with white winter powder sugar sun. And nobody to munch on it with — Francesca Lia Block

I want him to see the flowers in my eyes and hear the songs in my hands. — Francesca Lia Block

What else was filmmmaking about if not a series of perfect and potent images strung together like the words of a poem? — Francesca Lia Block

Are you?
What?
What you once were?
I can't remember. — Francesca Lia Block

Baby, I love you. Pen ... More then I love the color black. More than I love cigarettes, more than I love books. Even music."
"More than food. More than art or stories. More than words ... — Francesca Lia Block

I still can't talk about it," he said
"Duck." Dirk touched his cheek
"I remember, later, my mom trying to run into the water and I'm trying to hold her back and her hair and my tears are so bright that I'm blind. I knew she would have walked right into the ocean after him and kept going. In a way I wanted to go too. — Francesca Lia Block

After his kisses and hugs it feels like without them my body will fall apart into pieces. — Francesca Lia Block

Love can be so sttange and sad. It can be hard to understand why we run toward certain people and away from others at different times in our lives. Why we search so hard for that thing we are looking for, and the run so fast when we find it. Sick Pleasure - Francesca Lia Block — Stephanie Perkins

Beauty loved him more than anything, her Beast boy, but, secretly, sometimes, she wished he would have remained a Beast. — Francesca Lia Block

You asked me who I thought I was before. I said maybe I was a fish because I love water and you said, you thought a mermaid, maybe.
If you were a mermaid, you said, if you were a mermaid, I was the sea. — Francesca Lia Block

He smells like night-blooming flowers
Crushed, juicy petals on the pillows
His voice is full of ocean
Humming like the surf
He kneels before me like I am his goddess
He is a god — Francesca Lia Block

Valentine
my friends stitched it up with golden thread
like a red
satin pillow they gave me other whole ones too
roses and charms and red candles
milagros to repair the real one
they told me i was no longer allowed to give it away
a pretty pin cushion
a piece of mexican folk art
a hundred beating poems left unanswered
like a thing to wear around the neck
they said you must heal we will protect you
but i sat weeping at the computer forging ahead anyway
with the small stitched thing struggling in my chest
it knew that it had needed to be torn
so that it could recognize and receive the hundred kindnesses
traveling across three thousand miles at the speed of light
a storm of petals and beautiful words and tiny hearts to keep it
company — Francesca Lia Block

She was free, still, like a child, the way it is before you are seen and then after that you can never remember who you are unless someone else shows it to you. — Francesca Lia Block

Like Beauty. But she only pricked her finger. I had a spindle through my heart. — Francesca Lia Block

She knew they were all afraid. But love and disease are both like electricity, Weetzie thought. They are always there
you can't see or smell or hear, touch or taste them, but you know they are there like a current in the air. We can choose, Weetzie thought, we can choose to plug into the love current instead. — Francesca Lia Block

Maybe one night I'll be asleep and I'll feel a hand like a dove on my cheekbone and feel her breath cool like peppermints and when I open my eyes my mom will be there like an angle, saying in the softest voice, When you are born it is like a long, long dream. Don't try to wake up. Just go along until it is over. Don't be afraid. You may not know it all the time but I am with you. I am with you. — Francesca Lia Block

The rain is coming.
little sister, the night broke. the thunder cracked my brain finally. the rain is coming, i promise you. i didn't mean to but your tears will bring life back. purple flowers grow, the colour blood looks in the veins. they'll sprout out of my chest. i promise you they'll crack the ground, grow over the freeways, down the slopes to the sea. i'll be in their faces. i'll be in the waves, coming down from the sky. i'll be inside the one who holds you.
and then i won't be. — Francesca Lia Block

She pushed the gardener away and called for them. In her sleep she had seen love. It was poisoning. It was possessing. Devouring. Or it was seven pairs of boots climbing up the stairs to find her. — Francesca Lia Block

So Witch Baby played. Tossing her head, sucking in her cheeks and popping up with the impact of each beat. Thrusting her whole body into the music and thrusting the music into the air around her. She imagined that her drums were planets and the music was all the voices of growth and light and life joined together and traveling the universe. — Francesca Lia Block

L.A. kills people.' Jacaranda said. 'You're lucky you're leaving. You'll be able to write.'
She looked paler, going through another depression, smoking in bed in her lilac room. The walls were the color of her veins. She was getting too thin, even for the modeling ... Jacaranda died last winter when the flowering trees were bare. You couldn't even tell which ones once cried the purple blossoms she named herself after. — Francesca Lia Block

I said I was an English major, that I wanted to write someday, that I read the way other people ate chocolate. — Francesca Lia Block