Quotes from Rikki Ducornet

What are books but tangible dreams? What is reading if it is not dreaming? The best books cause us to dream; the rest are not worth reading.

A book is a private thing, citizen; it belongs to the one who writes it and to the one who reads it. Like the mind itself, a book is a private space. Within that space, anything is possible. The greatest evil and the greatest good.

Next I prayed to Allah, whose ears are deaf; then did I beseech his fallen twin, the Devil Hornprick, who sits upon his thorn of fire, gloating upon his constellations and counting his bloody seeds. In Baclava it is said Hornprick once caught a glimpse of the First Woman, as she sat singing to her snake in her chamber of sacred mud. Dazzled by her sight, the light of love and lust, he fell. He is still falling. For all eternity her breasts orbit his dreams.

I am a wheel. As I rise, Sweetheart, I carry you along with me, a heady, dizzying spin toward the sweet oceans of eternity. On wings of flames we sink into the sea of love. May be burn forever like bees in honey. Who does not wish for that delirium to last forever?

I like to imagine that Adam's tongue, his palate and his lips were always on fire, that the air he breathed was kindled to incandescence each time he cried out in sorrow or delight. If fiction can be said to have a function, it is to release that primary fury of which language, even now, is miraculously capable - from the dry mud of daily use. So that furred, spotted and striped, it may - as it did in Eden - scrawl under every tree as revelation.

All things pass, all things, that is, but mystery.

My pen is the key to a fantastic bordello, and once the gate is opened, it ejaculates a bloody ink. The virgin paper set to shriek evokes worlds heretofore unknown: eruptive, incorruptible, suffocating.

Truth is a leper banished from the hearts of men and rotting away in exile. All that is left is corruption, a bad smell, some unnameable pieces of what was once a thing lucent and good.

Luckless is that country in which the symbols of procreation are held in horror!' he wrote, 'while the agents of destruction are revered!

An important memory is like a gravitational field--the mind is compelled to return to it again and again. It is like a moon; it lives in light and shadow.

The world is brimming with plaster replicas, and the point is to smash them to bits, to create an upheaval so acute it cannot be anticipated or resisted.

Terrible things happen all the time, he thinks, but not today. Terrible things, beautiful things, things of such power, of such bewilderment, lucent and dark as tar. But right now the universe, restless beyond imagining, a universe of rock and flame, whose nature is incandescence—a universe that flickers, its impatient forms blinking like fireflies in the night—astounds and delights him.

Nature knows no Moral Order. Nature doesn't give a fig for social conventions or ethical questions. And God cannot respond to or repair evil, because He is not there to witness it.

The world is a translation of the divine, and its manifestation. To write a text is to propose a reading of the world and reveal its potencies

And I cannot help but wonder as we navigate the realms of our own manufacture, will we remember how to cherish one another, or will these realms turn out to be far too self-referential, a kind of beautifully furnished tomb, a mind loop, a mirror reflecting a mirror-offering a vista that can only induce dizziness, longing, and loneliness?

A fan is like the thighs of a woman: It opens and closes. A good fan opens with a flick of the wrist. It produces its own weather---a breeze not so strong as to muss the hair.

I, sole heir to the Munodi line and memory, am childless. A friend who knows such things has told me that this explains my compulsion to capture what I can with black ink on white paper." ("The Volatilized Ceiling of Baron Munodi")

The purpose of myth, therefore, is to both reveal and conceal. To tell what we have seen and disguise it, to mask God's forked tongue.

He appreciates the night and its wandering points of light, its lawns turned the color of blackberry jelly, its gravel smoothed to tweed, its owls tearing at the throats of mice. He is bountiful with love. If America has gods, this is where they dwell—under rocks, in the branches of trees, in ivy, skunkweed, the hearts of fish, the flight of geese.

The texts we write are not visible until they are written. Like a creature coaxed from out a deep wood, the text reveals itself little by little.

I've often wondered if Morality is an attribute of Reason. Of course, evil is always buttressed by 'reasonable' arguments. Yet, what if True Reason is an attribute of Morality, and True Morality an attribute of Reason?

I knew Donald Fagan at Bard. He was wildly gifted. He gave me a phone number which I never used and I guess I lost! Philosophically it's an interesting song; I mean I think his 'number' is a cipher for the self.