Quotes from Eleni Sikelianos

We tend to crave a "and so it is" and "so it was" that the illusion of a single perspective brings, but one thing I have learned from being in the world is that there is no such panopticon. Panopticons are for surveillance states. It behooves us as writers and artists at this moment in history to honor the unknown and the unknowable.

In this city of unsimilars I give my body to science and mosquitoes, but I still want to live in it despite carhorns & reckless poverty, all forms of carbon copies, hard-ons, declining trees & me & my organs to you, Carlotta

The window's amber glass gives a diamond cutout into the world which is one I wouldn't want to be in — leafless and gray with frozen flaques on which to slip and bust your ass, and everyone inside's a bit gray, too, as if the sky's cold hand had caressed then invaded the face.

In waking life (just now), if I read his face like a card there is a reversal of fortunes, for I am the body he did not help, and when a body dies we can no longer study the hynger paths so that when I speak of him, instead of saying "father", I must say "your father" or "this man I knew" or "this dead man's eyebrow." What is a dead man? What does a dead man?

In waking life (just now), if I read his face like a card there is a reversal of fortunes, for I am the body he did not help, and when a body dies we can no longer study the hunger paths so that when I speak of him, instead of saying "father," I must say "your father" or "this man I knew" or "this dead man's eyebrow." What is a dead man? What does a dead man?