Zink Quotes & Sayings

It was like giving a Jewish kid a coffee-table book about Auschwitz. — Nell Zink

I'm not very good with anything physical ... ' she began as they turned down a hallway she had never seen.
He flashed her a grin as they walked.
'I find that hard to believe.'
She caught the innuendo in his voice and felt a blush creep to her cheeks.
'You know what I mean. — Michelle Zink

(It was accepted practice to let your husband camp out in summer near a source of sweet wine and steaks past their sell-by date, but you had to take him back in winter.) — Nell Zink

I never take pictures. Skies are much larger in reminiscences and my friends are much better-looking. Photos crop reality into little squares; instead, I have very good binoculars. — Nell Zink

Gradually her fear faded to the existential angst that incessantly haunts all mankind in modernity. — Nell Zink

When the past is hard to explain, it's best to concentrate on the future. — Nell Zink

She was young the way an actual young person is young. — Nell Zink

What's important is the tolerance. If people are not beating other people up, or shooting them for being different, then that's progress. Even if the ideas that go through their head are fodder for novelists. — Nell Zink

My social status in the last year has gone from zero to hero. — Nell Zink

In the rural South, the only interesting people were the sexual deviants. Everybody else was able to be part of the mainstream, and could find a way somehow. — Nell Zink

She appreciated his protection, of course, but she was not sure if she wanted to be looked at ... as if she were fragile. A thing to hold gingerly, as one holds a delicate rose, careful not to bump its silken petals lest they should spill to the floor. — Michelle Zink

There was no circumcision. Lee said circumcision was dreamed up by moralists and lotion salesmen to make hand jobs chafe, and Peggy deferred to his better judgement. — Nell Zink

Whether or not Darius is pleased doesn't matter.' Griffin's voice took on a hard edge, and for a moment, he almost sounded like his brother. 'He has what he needs. He always has. Now ... ' he began.
'Yes?' she prompted.
'I need you,' he said. — Michelle Zink

If you have to be bad, be so bad sympathetic hearers just shake their heads and give up. Nobody — Nell Zink

Keeper scum."
"That's offensive coming from a wraith. I think I'm going to have to defend my honor. — Michelle Zink

What is a poem, if not a toy mouse viewed from an angle that makes it appear to take over the world? Lee — Nell Zink

You've become my friend, and I love you."
It was right and true and that made saying it easy.
She heard the surprise in the intake of his breath.
"And I, you, Helen. I think I've loved you since the moment you first stood on my doorstep." He paused. "But now, I really must insist that you sleep. My love will still be here when you wake up. — Michelle Zink

Lee explained to her that art for art's sake is an upper-class aesthetic. To create art divorced from any purpose, you can't be living a life driven by need and desire. — Nell Zink

the heartrending petty bourgeois piteousness of cucumber sandwiches passed around by accounting majors whose overly colorful bow ties had been expressly chosen to keep them from looking like waiters. — Nell Zink

(why exactly twenty-somethings are considered so vital to protest movements, I never figured out, seeing as how they never vote and have no money) — Nell Zink

I'd say it's never a challenge to present white and heteronormative privilege. The hard thing is to write any other way. — Nell Zink

Perhaps because it seems so appropriate, I don't notice the rain. It falls in sheets, a blanket of silvery thread rushing to the hard almost-winter ground. Still, I stand without moving at the side of the coffin. — Michelle Zink

Whatever I was writing at the time, I knew there was no market for it and never would be, because there's never a market for true art, so my main concern was always to have a job that didn't require me to write or think. — Nell Zink

Twee," the wallcreeper remarked. "Twee! — Nell Zink

If and when family planning is the responsibility of females, males are best kept under lock and key. — Nell Zink

I felt like the Empress Theodora. Can I get more orifices? I thought. Is that what she meant in the Historia Arcana - not that three isn't enough, but that the three on offer aren't enough to sustain a marriage? — Nell Zink

Time - and all the events held therein - plays out as it must. We cannot impose our will on it. The only true measure of strength is our ability to bear that which time demands. — Michelle Zink

I love you anyway, Lia," he calls after me. "Until time tells, I mean."
I turn to him and smile, loving him more in this moment than any other. "Until time tells, then, Henry, and beyond. I love you as well. — Michelle Zink

Some things must be done however much we wish to avoid them. — Michelle Zink

Her social position at Safeway was better than it was at home. — Nell Zink

I avoid looking at the clock, fearing the slow passing of time that will only seem slower if I watch its progress. — Michelle Zink

Still, experience has taught me that knowing one's enemy is key to winning any battle. — Michelle Zink

Over milk and cookies after Karen's return, she confessed to Karen that she had no idea what Karen wanted out of life. "You're a cipher," she said. "A mystery. What are your ambitions and desires? When I was your age, I wanted to write plays." "I want to get good grades and go to college." "And what are you going to do when you get there?" "How would I know? I need to get there first and see what it's like. There are all these majors that sound neat, but I don't know what they are. Like 'sociology.' What is it? — Nell Zink

The blackness that smothers me is total, and in the moment before everything falls away, I know what it feels like to be dead. — Michelle Zink

College girls on the road! One-night stands! Lee felt like an Austro-Hungarian emperor attended on his deathbed by flappers. He felt them stealing his life - literally going back in time and taking, through their incoherent lifestyles, the little he had struggled so hard to attain. — Nell Zink

I'm only trying to pull my own weight. I don't want to be a liability.'
She reached out, smiling.
'And I would imagine I'll still be required to maintain close contact with you while I learn. At least in the beginning.'
He looked at their joined hands before turning his eyes to hers, a slow smile spreading across his own lips.
'It would be, ahem, wise to maintain physical contact while learning, that is true. — Michelle Zink

I've begun to wonder if that's all we really need. Just one person who knows us truly. One person who knows the darkness that lies within and believes in us anyway. — Michelle Zink

She simply knew she was about to lose something valuable, and like anybody else, she wanted to take the next logical step to make it her own: She wanted to fuck it. — Nell Zink

I had to do something, because the minute I broke up with Elvis, I fell in love with him. — Nell Zink

Excuse me," Helen interrupted. "Did you say sewage tunnels?"
Darius grinned. "That I did, Princess. — Michelle Zink

Case in point: Byrdie, the son growing effortlessly into lifelong boyhood. Still a schoolboy, soon to be an old boy, blithely accepting accidents as privileges - for instance, his natural immunity to HIV. (Byrdie liked studious, upper-class females. They were not exactly high risk.) Byrdie was the phoenix edition of Lee, adapted to the novel environment, and Lee was a useless relic. He had positioned himself all his life as a rebel against a hegemonic order no one was interested in questioning anymore. It had lost its power to crush and all its clumsy weapons that inspired active fear. Its dominance was equal, but separate. — Nell Zink

You can ascend to the region of blue sky and great wandering shadows. The shelter that received the risen Christ and Port in The Sheltering Sky, that comforted the mortally wounded Prince Andrei and the young W. E. B. Du Bois. — Nell Zink

Books never lied to me, never betrayed me, never left me alone and wondering what was wrong with me. — Michelle Zink

He's a clever little thing, isn't he?"
She leaned in to drop a kiss on the kitten's soft head, reaching to move him off Griffin's chest. He reached for her hand, stopping her.
"And what about me?" he asked, his eyes burning into hers.
"What about you?"
"Am I not clever enough for a kiss?" His voice was gruff.
She favored him with a shy smile.
"You're more than clever enough, Griffin Channing. — Michelle Zink

I recall his somber eyes during that last, private conversation. His eyes and his words, far too wise for a boy of ten: only time will tell, Lia.
In the end, I suppose it will. — Michelle Zink

I really like writing in English, and it's the best job I've ever had. — Nell Zink

The interesting artists I know are the ones doing political work. The most interesting people I know are the people who care about politics. — Nell Zink

He informed Byrdie that his social engineering ambitions betrayed all the delusions of grandeur that you might expect from the son of a poet. — Nell Zink

Human beings are just way more complex than they'd like to be. They like to be simple machines. And they'll set up fantasy scenarios where they're simple machines, and get hurt and do things they regret. — Nell Zink

Besides, adulthood is never something girls grow into. It is something they have thrust upon them, menstruation being only the first of many two-edged swords subsumed under the rubric "becoming a woman," all of them occasions to stay home from school and weep. — Nell Zink

For jobs and men, it's a seller's market. There are no other fish in the sea. — Nell Zink

it's the stories we tell ourselves that cause all the problems. If you look reality straight in the eye, you end up a lot less confused. — Nell Zink

Fatherhood surprised him pleasantly. As a male he assumed no unpleasant duties would accrue to him. He would be responsible for teaching the child conversational skills once it reached its teens. — Nell Zink

As a writer, she was struggling. As an accomplice to the wholesale drug trade, she was setting new benchmarks for excellence in felony crime. The — Nell Zink

So many men, so little parking. — Nell Zink

I wanted to hear my own whispers in the next room and know that I was thinking of me. — Nell Zink

Don't you see, Helen? There would be no life for me now without you in it."
He covered her hand with his own, bringing it to his lips.
"I need to know that you're mine. That I alone have your heart. — Michelle Zink

But I know that in order to get to the end of a thing, one must start at the beginning. — Michelle Zink

It's a digital e-cigarette." "What's digital about it?" "You hold it in your fingers, like this." "I'm serious. Is it part of the Internet of things? Do they know when you're smoking it?" "I don't think so. I think they just mean it works on electricity. — Nell Zink

You're a cis-het dude-bro on strike for better conditions. — Nell Zink

The library, like the thrift shop, specialised in the leavings of the elderly dead. — Nell Zink

I have known many people who were seduced as children by same-sex partners and then spent their teen years being gay, and then found their way back to heterosexuality as adults. — Nell Zink

She didn't know why it should seem strange that Darius fancied someone, but even as little as she knew him, it already seemed improbable, though not as improbable as someone fancying him in return. — Michelle Zink

And the black box in her arms whimpered itself to sleep with longing to be a normal person who is chosen, not a special person who is discovered. To be the kind of duck who gets included by wild swans — Nell Zink

People wanted to get me published, and my early work was so weird that they weren't getting anywhere. I thought, okay, I'll do something that's just a tad more normal. — Nell Zink

She would see that in England, for reasons unknown, a woman can simultaneously be cute as a bug's ear, a serious rose gardener, and a nymphomaniac. — Nell Zink

I'm enough of an anarchist aesthetically, when it comes to art - I want people to be reading my stuff voluntarily. They should be doing it because they want to. — Nell Zink

Peggy had not forgotten the intellectual and social ambitions she had started life with only a decade before. Years so weary and routine laden, they seemed like a single year that had repeated itself. She wanted to be creative and self-reliant. — Nell Zink

As I was to learn, reproductive urges will serve as an alibi for just about anything. — Nell Zink

then decided maybe something was wrong with Sundays. He tried Saturday and saw about two thousand — Nell Zink

She had read enough lives of the poetesses to know all about inpatient psychiatric care. — Nell Zink

Nell Zink is a writer of extraordinary talent and range. Her work insistently raises the possibility that the world is larger and stranger than the world you think you know. — Jonathan Franzen

Why shouldn't loving puppets be a revolutionary act, in a world where so many people love drone warfare? — Nell Zink

From the passenger seat the wallcreeper said, "Twee. — Nell Zink

As a speller he was adrift in a no-man's-land between phonetic and dyslexic. — Nell Zink

...the whole universe is contagious if you look at it long enough. Just opening your eyes puts you in front of a mirror, psychologically speaking. Garbage in, garbage out. Or rather, garbage goes in, but you never get rid of it. It just lies there turning to dust and slowly wafting a thin layer of grime on to every other object in your brain. Scraping the gunk off is not only a major challenge, but the chief burden of human existence. that's why I keep things so clean. Otherwise I would see little flecks of [ ] shit everywhere I looked ... — Nell Zink

If I'd had a nickel for every time Rachel had said whatever, we wouldn't have had to steal Warren Fairchild's gold. — Michelle Zink

I saw that I had followed the chief guiding principle of the petty bourgeoisie in modernity and made a virtue of necessity in telling myself my husband was a good lover. — Nell Zink

There are terrible things that never get easier, and there are things even more terrible that get easier with time and repetition. — Nell Zink

You could take winos off the sidewalk in front of the drugstore and teach them to be poets in half an hour. — Nell Zink

Its emptiness is more than the lack of living, breathing beings. It is the unread pages of the many books that reside on the shelves throughout the room I should hot have thought one could tell when books have gone unread, but after the company of Birchwood's well-loved library it is as if I can hear these books whispering, their pages grasping and reaching for an audience. — Michelle Zink

The girl looked up, blinking, a far-off expression in here eyes. I recognized it, understood the shock of realizing the world inside your book wasn't real. Even worse, you were in another world entirely and no one understood - or even cared - that you preferred the one living on the page. — Michelle Zink

They should build a monument," Cary said. "All the times I got my ass beat to a pulp so the youth of today could get dolled up like faggots to go out in public. — Nell Zink

Meg felt her heart constrict. There was so much she wanted to say to him. Things any normal mother would say, like that a one-handed backhand is more versatile. — Nell Zink

But I learned long ago that it does no good to think too far into the future. There is only here. Only now. — Michelle Zink

Alice will always be a beautiful mystery. It is one I am content not to solve.I can love her now in her lovely darkness. -Amalia Milthorpe — Michelle Zink

I think I should learn to jump on my own soon, don't you?'
'And deprive myself of the opportunity to be near you?'
His voice was husky in her ear, his breath tickling the tender skin of her neck.
'That seems foolish on my part, but if you'd like to learn, I'll teach you.'
She nodded, her voice stuck in her throat.
'Very well,' he said. 'But not tonight. Tonight you'll stay with me. — Michelle Zink

It was a pastiche of public library porn from Irving Stone to Philip Roth. — Nell Zink

The day is like a diamond, all beautiful warmth on the outside but without any heat to accompany it. — Michelle Zink

Her soul was as cold as the air that bit through London in winter, her grief a shadow to the vengeance ... — Michelle Zink

I must confess I will miss your ... proximity when jumping together.'
'Well,' she said, answering his smile with one of her own.
'There's always sickle training in the ballroom.'
'That there is. — Michelle Zink

There is no ladylike way to tell him to push all he wants, that his mouth and body on mine are the only things keeping me from losing my hold on a reality I never questioned until these past days. — Michelle Zink

I am not my mother. I love her, but I am not her. — Michelle Zink

I shake my head. "Remember, Mother. There are no mistakes."
She smiles through her tears, leaning in to kiss my cheek "No mistakes, my angel. — Michelle Zink

To find the books end,
cross the ancient wood to the mystic isle.
Until then, prepare yourself
for the coming battle ...
AND TRUST NO ONE. — Michelle Zink