Quotes from Russell Edson

The best advice I can give is to ignore advice. Life is too short to be distracted by the opinions of others.

It is very difficult to stop feeling.

She fell in love with her doctor's stethoscope, the way it listened to her heart.

Perhaps I should kiss the face of the kitchen clock for luck. Perhaps its little hands with rapture would encircle my neck and we might be happy. I am sure happiness is not too far away

There's only the writing, which I admit to knowing very little about. But then it's probably best not to know. It allows one to work without expectation. Best to let the poem do the thinking while we concern ourselves with what's called the personal life.

description is deadly to a prose poem.

So Mr Brain opened his mouth to let a moonbeam into his head.

One feels that things are about to change. I have felt this all my life. It is a readiness that robs every act of meaning, making every situation obsolete, putting the present into the past.

Everything is made of time, and we go out in waves, accumulating around ourselves in halos of dust, the borders bleeding into each other; the tearing and merging of clouds.

This is the house of the closet-man. There are no rooms, just hallways and closets. Things happen in rooms. He does not like things to happen.

Remember, words are the enemy of poetry.

I never liked the term "experimental writing," but what else is a prose poem? Having written a number of them, I still don't know how they're written.

A toy-maker made a toy wife and a toy child. He made a toy house and some toy years.

Russell Edson: The things we took for granted do not take us so.

What shall I do? screamed his son. Sit until time embraces you into the bosom of its velvet quiet, cried the father. Like this? cried his son as his son became dust.

Goddamn these sentiences, roared the tree with birds shrieking in its branches.

On the other side of a mirror there's an inverse world, where the insane go sane; where bones climb out of the earth and recede to the first slime of love.

A lighted window floats through the night like a piece of paper in the wind. I want to see into it. I want to climb through into its lighted room. As I reach for it it slips through the trees. As I chase it it rolls and tumbles into the air and skitters on through the night...

The Rule and Its Exception The big toe located on each of the two feet of man (Homo sapiens, "man, the wise") has as its main functions the growing of a toenail and the production of pain when stepped on ... Death is the exception to this rule. Goodbye, my friends ...

If one cannot accept failure and scorn, how is he to make his art? It's like wanting to go to heaven without dying.