Quotes from Lydia Millet

Beneath the violet pillar, in the vacuum before the roar of the cloud, there came a soft sound that might have been heard by those who listened closely: the gentle sigh of an idea unbound.

When we ran, if we chose to, we ran like flashes of silk. We had the vigor of those freshly born. Relatively speaking. And no, we wouldn't be like this forever. We knew it, on a rational level. But the idea that those garbage-like figures that tottered around the great house were a vision of what lay in store—hell no. Had they had goals once? A simple sense of self-respect? They shamed us. They were a cautionary tale.

Called by the sirens and followed by an albatross.

What was a face on television but a code, and what was the difference between these faces but a realignment of line and color to shift among signals? If he grasped deeply this language of symbols, grasped it beneath the surface, he could course through the currents of authority as they coursed through him like heat or the tremble of cold.

Oh how the world reflected you in its unending streams of atoms, churning atoms out of which significance beamed--significance, but not purpose.

suffering can be a work of art. It can be made of buried and rising things, helpless and undiscovered, song of frustrated want, silence after desire. It can be the test of the self falling short, constrained, distorted, disturbed or rebuffed, the vacuum left by longing, call without an answer.

Maybe surrender, when it was called for, was the hard part. Not the fight.

Then he would get into a plane and leave the field wide open; the field was crammed with paralegals, all of them stoutly armed with condoms.

There was the honour and austerity of money as he walked through art galleries, as he saw around him the collections of oil paintings by dead men, lit so carefully that warmth seemed to emanate from within - and not because their art was loved or understood but because it could be sold and bought for handsome sums.

We were a roiling mass of opinion, most of it mean. Here we sat at civilization's technological peak, and what we chose to do on that shining pinnacle was hate each other's guts.

What place would that be, a whole world without roads? It was a panicking thought. A world without roads! He would go nowhere in such a place. He would be trapped where he was, he would have lived out his life only where he was born.

Although she didn't have the plumbing, she deluded herself that she was the modern W.C. (about Margaret Thatcher, M.T.)

A FEW PETS had come with us for the summer: three dogs and a cat, a pissed-off Siamese with a skin condition. Dandruff. We dressed up the dogs in costumes from a wicker chest, but could not dress the cat. She scratched.

Because boys, and later men, regardless of their best intentions often seemed to yearn for something they just never succeeded in defining. You pitied them for it, your heart went out to them, but still there was a chronic gap between what they should be and what they were capable of being. Into that gap civilization fell.

One dog got makeup applied to its face, lipstick and blue eye shadow. It was a white-faced dog, so the makeup showed up well. We liked to have an impact. When we were done, the lipstick went back into some mother's Fendi handbag. We watched her apply it, unaware. That was satisfying.