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novels

selections from "children of the albatross"

"This image of herself as a not ordinary women, an image which was trembling now in his eyes, might suddenly disappear. Nothing more difficult to live up to than men’s dreams." from Children of the Albatross

"In the world of the dreamer there was solitude: all the exaltations and joys came in the moment of preparation for living. They took place in solitude. But with action came anxiety, and the sense of insuperable effort made to match the dream, and with it came weariness, discouragement, and the flight into solitude again. And then in solitude, in the opium den of remembrance, the possibility of pleasure again." from Children of the Albatross

"What was the mystery of women? Only this obstinacy in concealing themselves-merely this persistence in creating mysteries, as if the exposure of her thoughts and feelings were gifts reserved for love and intimacy" from Children of the Albatross

selections from "house of incest"

" The morning I got up to begin this book I coughed. Something was coming out of my throat: it was strangling me. I broke the thread which held it and yanked it out. I went back to bed and said: I have just spat out my heart. There is an instrument called the quena made of human bones. It owes its origin to the worship of an Indian for his mistress. When she died he made a flute out of her bones. The quena has a more penetrating more haunting sound than the ordinary flute. Those who write know the process. I thought of it as I was spitting out my heart. Only I do not wait for my love to die." from House of Incest

"My first vision of earth was water vieled. I am of the race of men and women who see all things through this curtain of the sea, and my eyes are the color of water." from House of Incest

"The leaf fall of her words, the stained glass hues of her moods, the rust in her voice, the smoke in her mouth, her breath on my vision like human breath blinding a mirror." from House of Incest

"There is no mockery between women. One lies down at peace as on one’s own breast." from House of Incest

"From all men I was different, and myself, but I see in you that part of me which is you." from House of Incest

"Your lies are not lies Sabina. They are arrows flung out of your orbit by the strength of your fantasy. To destroy reality. I will help you: it is I who will invent lies for you and with them we will traverse the world." from House of Incest

"I am enmeshed in my lies, and I want absolution. I cannot tell the truth because I have felt the heads of men in my womb. The truth would be death-dealing and I prefer fairytales. I am wrapped in lies which do not penetrate my soul. As if the lies I tell were like costumes." from House of Incest

"I looked upon a clock to find the truth. The hours were passing like ivory chess figurres, striking piano notes, and the minutes raced on wires mounted like tin soldiers. Hours like tall ebony women with gongs between their legs, tolling continuously so that I could not count them. I heard the rolling of my heart-beats; I heard the footsteps of my dreams, and the beat of time was lost among them like the face of truth." from House of Incest

selections from "collages"

She read to her father in the flat toned voice the effect of consciousness expanding chemicals. "Colors breathe and emit light." "But my colors do that," said Varda. "Figures dissolve into one another and appear at times transparent." "As they do in my collages," said Varda. "Someone saw whirling clouds, suns and moons," she read in the same voice as she might have read: "Imperial Valley produced 20,000 heads of lettuce." "As in the paintings of Van Gogh," said Varda. "What need of chemicals?" "But when you take a chemical you know it will affect you for only a few hours and then you will return to normality. You can control it, modify it, you can even stop its effects if you wish to, if you don't like what is happening to you." "In other words, a return ticket," said Varda. "The next day the world is back again in its proper place, the real colors are back." "Doesn't that prove that when you remove an inhibiting consciousness and let men dream they all dream like painters or poets?" from Collages

"I know you do not like strangers; but, just as you are no stranger to me, I cannot be stranger to you because I feel that, in a sense, you gave birth to me. I feel you once described a man who is me before I knew I was, and it was because I recognized him that I was able to be myself. You will recognize me when you see me, I am sure you have already recognized how I think; this mixture in me which makes me feel my way through experience as women do, and yet talk even when I do not wish to talk like an intellectual, a scholar (which is mockery as I do not believe that they know as much as the poet in his delirium)." from Collages

"Every word you wrote I ate, as if it were manna. Finding one's self in a book is a second birth; and you are the only one who knows that at times men behave like women and women like men, and that all these distinctions are mock distinctions." from Collages

"Solitude may rust your words." from Collages

"Human beings can reach such desperate solitude that they may cross a boundary beyond which words cannot serve, and at such moments there is nothing left for them but to bark." from Collages

selections from "the novel of the future"

"The dream has to be translated into reality." from The Novel Of The Future

"Neurosis was caused by our attempt to separate physical and metaphysical levels, to set them up in opposition to each other, thus engaging in an internecine war. If it is true that we do live on several levels simultaneously- drama and action, past and present, personnel and collective- we are given ways to unify them: one by religion, the other by art. Separating such levels is only necessary when they conflict, and separation is a result of conflict. Seeing how these levels can work together in harmony is the task of our contemporary writers." from The Novel Of The Future

"The psychologist, while using dreams as a kind of electronic echo sounder to chart the depths of unconscious, is often, according to Dr. R. D. Laing, too anxious to draw boundary lines according to definitions of normalcy which really do not exist as finite truths but fluctuate and vary and are altered by new researches." from The Novel Of The Future

"For the neurotic, the merging of the subconscious and the conscious may be risky, just as it is for the users of drugs. But for the writer who is aware of the way in which this connection exists in reality and nourishes creativity, the sooner he can achieve a synthesis among intellect, emotion, and instinct, the sooner his work will be integrated." from The Novel Of The Future

"The unconscious can become destructive if it is disregarded and thwarted. Neurosis, based on the year, creates solitary cells to protect itself from invasion." from The Novel Of The Future

"We are beginning to see the influence of dream upon reality and reality upon dream." from The Novel Of The Future

"It was a misunderstanding to stress the dream like quality of the novels. What I meant to stress was the interrelation between dream and life, between dream and action." from The Novel Of The Future

"The necessity for fiction was probably born of the problem of taboo on certain revelations. It was not only a need of the imagination but an answer to the limitations placed on portrayal of others." from The Novel Of The Future

"I think that natural truths will cease to be spat at us like insults, that aesthetics will once more be linked with ethics, and that people will become aware that in casting out aesthetics that they also cast out a respect for human life, a respect for creation, a respect for spiritual values. Aesthetics was an expression of man's need to be in love with his world. The cult of ugliness is a regression. It destroys our appetite, our love for our world." from The Novel Of The Future

"We are born with the power to alter what we are given at birth." from The Novel Of The Future

"The creative personality never remains fixed on the first world it discovers. It never resigns itself to anything." from The Novel Of The Future

selections from "under a glass bell"

"I love your silences, they are like mine. You are the only being before whom I am not distressed by my own silences. You have a vehement silence, one feels it is charged with essences, it is a strangely alive silence, like a trap open over a well, from which one can hear the secret murmur of the earth itself." from Je suis le plus malade des Surrealistes, a short story in Under A Glass Bell

"I am the one who has felt most deeply the stuttering of the tongue in its relation to thought." from Je suis le plus malade des Surrealistes, a short story in Under A Glass Bell

"I feel a fatigue of the tongue seeking to utter impossible things until it twists itself into a knot and chokes me. I feel a fatigue at this mass of nerves seeking to uphold a world that is falling apart. I feel a fatigue at feeling, at the fervor of my dreams, the fever of my thought, the intensity of my hallucinations. A fatigue at the sufferings of others and my own. I feel my own blood thundering inside of me, I feel the horror of falling into abysms. But you and I would always fall together and I would not be afraid. We would fall into abysms, but you would carry your phosphorescences to the very bottom of the abysms. We could fall together and ascend together, far into space. I was always exhausted by my dreams, not because of the dreams, but because of the fear of not being able to return. I do not need to return. I will find you everywhere. You alone can go wherever I go, into the same mysterious regions. You too know the language of the nerves. You will always know what I am saying even if I do not." from Je suis le plus malade des Surrealistes, a short story in Under A Glass Bell

"all those who try to unveil the mysteries always have tragic lives. At the end they are always punished." from The Mohican, a short story in Under A Glass Bell

selections from "winter of artiface"

"Only in the fever of creation could she recreate her own lost life." from Winter of Artiface

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