Quotes from Jenny Boully

It was the particular feel of him that made me want to go back: everything that is said is said underneath, where, if it does matter, to acknowledge it is to let on to your embarrassment. That I love you makes me want to run and hide.

It is not the story I know or the story you tell me that matters; it is what I already know, what I don't want to hear you say. Let it exist this way, concealed; let me always be embarrassed, knowing that you know that I know but pretend not to know.

But in those days, I thought that by believing in magic and miracles, by believing hard enough, harder than anyone on earth, I would be made witness to the sublime. And so, what I was doing on the rooftop was praying. I was praying for the gift of flight, for the black umbrella and the hidden angels to aid me.

Let those strikes of lightning come so we will quickly know what leaves us.

I suppose we were merely on loan in each other's lives; these last years have already broken their secrets, have already gone out ahead and beyond us, reaching their conclusions: the present was beautiful in my not knowing. There are some sufferings as crimson and fallen, vibrant as autumn's tremblings.

The experience of time translates itself into language, and language translates itself into distance, which translates itself into longing, which is the realization of time. (…) how sad and strange that I, Jenny Boully, should be the sign of a signifier or the signifier of a sign, moreover, the sign of a signifier searching for the signifies.

After all, when one goes out into the city with the sole goal of capturing the city, only to discover that the city is nothing but a restless shifting of scaffolding, then one must refrain from going out.

What image of beauty we hold exists so brilliantly, so beautifully in our minds, and the sad task then is to somehow transcribe this image so that it becomes viewable to others.

That I love you makes me want to run and hide.

The world then, was nothing more than lost messages, miscommunications--her heart, a daring carrier pigeon forever circling overhead.

I only said I loved you in my poetry.

Can you give to someone else what has been? That's the task of the poet.

What then of all the plot in between I have honestly forgotten? I feel a nausea of panic that I will die soon.

The important of the beginning is to make possible the love affair; the importance of the ending is to make impossible the love affair.

It wasn't that the ice-cream man came everyday; he came whenever the child heard his music.

Today, I saw a little girl in a little pink dress who couldn't be older than two, and I thought of how nothing could be more fleeting, more precious, more joyous than her not knowing how, running beneath the cherry trees, she was all lightness, all reverie.

In order to be a better writer and better reader, I need to believe in my own death and in the death of others.

Our drive to keep and preserve seems to have achieved only the obliteration of self and memory.

But when do the daydreams begin and the dreams end, and where does the sky end and the prairie grass begin? There are stars in the grass.

With dreaming, we speak differently. We use the past tense. Dreams are about the past, but we want them to be about the present, the future. That is, we will make them mean something.