Quotes from Carole Maso

Truth be told, there is not one day that goes by when I don't fall in love with someone, with something.

I believe in books.

How I love them. How good they are. They endure endless hours of me talking about the future. They keep me near and at the same time bid me farewell. That is what real love is.

But sometimes even the sky is dangerous. I look up and see your face in the stars.

One of the strangest things about writing well is that it requires two different zones in the brain--rigor and recklessness--simultaneously.

Huddled around the fire of the alphabet...

It's an honor and privilege to be next to the great mysteries, and that's what I get to do every day. Why are we here? How beautiful the Earth is. Whatever it is, large and small. There's so much that's beautiful and moving and sad, to experience that and find shapes for it, to deeply enter that meditative space. There's nothing like it. Everything else seems so pale.

You think an essay should have a hypothesis, a conclusion, should argue points. You really do bore me.

After sex, after coffee, after everything there is to be said -- The hovering and beautiful alphabet as we form our first words after making love. And somehow I'm still alive.

You were a painting by Matisse, but you took sleeping pills.

So little goes with the body of a man. So much is left behind.

What the light looks like in the pear trees, in October, is a hundred teardrops of gold, the whole orchard weeping.

One loves art more than life; it's better than life, don't you think, Ali? It doesn't disappoint so," she sighed. "It's not so frightening," she said, her eyes filled with terror.

In the calm violence of your being, desire.

I weep flowers, I weep song, I bleed

As if thought were not our most passionate, our most ardent aspect.

And she smiles and she utters unearthly things and she utters not in any known language, in stars and pain, pulque she says I am devouring time and the earth

This book is an invention, an act of the imagination, and in no way should be mistaken for reality, the place where much good invention originates.

Here, we turn everything into art.

Each word is a boat, a small saving thing in this increasingly dark, blood-drenched dream.

They trusted me as men carelessly, always, trust women-- as if this trust, this confidence was their birthright. A mistake-- in this case, at any rate.

And chanting sentences is the only way to feel better finally. And writing sentences, making shapes, is the only way to feel better. Sustaining, miraculous language, that all these years keeps illness at bay.

your head is flowers, your body the body of a deer, pierced

I had left her behind, again--because I could not write--write, that is, on my own terms, without concern for the marketplace, without selling out in small but grave ways: writing for magazines, or teaching prematurely, or making uncsoncious decisions that might make the work more sexy, more accessible--but for all the wrong reasons. It seemed crucial not to derail myself now, not to subvert myself, not give in.