Quotes from Kate Braverman

It's not platinum, which suggests constellations and redemption. It's another yellow entirely. Asthma yellow. It comes from rotting petals and camera flashes that permanently scar your face. It leaks from clusters of stucco that remind me of blisters and lumps you get on your lips from kissing the wrong people.

Now I know all city parks are the same. Hyde Park. The bluffs above Santa Monica. The Tuileries. Just paths beneath trees where people walk in varying states of heartbreak. Staggering between divorces and biopsies. And at the edge, one final row of lavender azaleas.

Los Angeles, brutal claustrophobic basin of delusion and ripoff, clutter, eerie, sticky, horrible. They came, they saw and wend blind. O hallucination of urban gray slabs. . . . Poor ruined sunsore and sadness for demented City of Angels, of white torment and hideous albino predator birds.

I've always lived here, by the sea. I was a beach brat. I was born riding the peak of a crest of a wave. I was born with salt in my eyes. No, I mean it. I was conceived right down there on that beach. Six years old and surfing. It's all that sea in me. That's what makes my eyes change color. I've got waves inside. The ocean runs through me, man.

Los Angeles. . . . It was some sort of organic ruin, an accident of architecture and brutal necessity. The iridescence was somehow almost legible, suggesting a calligraphy of exposed bone, transparencies, experimental skin grafts. The blood of Los Angeles was a red neon wash, a kind of sea of autistic traffic lights.

It occurred to her, suddenly, that the Chinese took poets as concubines. Their poets slept with warlords. They wrote with gold ink. They ate orchids and smoked opium. They were consecrated by nuance, by birds and silk and the ritual birthdays of gods and nothing changed for a thousand years. And afternoon was absinthe yellow and almond, burnt orange and chrysanthemum. And in the abstract sky, a litany of kites.

It is always a poet's winter.

Francisca recognized that she was decoding an entire process, detail by detail. She was learning a certain alphabet, a geography, a language which would become a revelation. This compelled her to stay. There were artifacts everywhere. She was assembling a lost civilization. When she viewed it in its entirety, she would become someone else.

walking on boulevards and beaches, examining postcards, studying angles of light and shadow

Los Angeles is like a white world, filled with ever smaller white circles, leading to some perfect white core. Los Angeles is where the angels with their white capped teeth and their white tennis dresses, gradually edged closer to the pure center, ambrosia, the fountain of youth.

Geography has not failed them. No one has loaded up a car, driven away and never been heard from again.

Location is a magical word. I used to believe it was related to cancer, that's one of the cancer questions. Where is the location? I think of location as being a word that falls somewhere between cancer and real estate.

It is in the ruins of this darkness that we absolve the ones who love us badly.

It is all stone upon stone, one at a time, relentless as cells. . . . And stone is the DNA of the exterior world.

I am learning how to mother. . . . I am distilling entire moral universes into single lines.

Women have waited millions of years growing separate as another species, with visions and priorities no man-words, no man-measurements can comprehend.

I find women as writers and as characters are operating within narrow confines. They inherit a kind of ghetto of the soul. I'm trying to enlarge the spectrum.

To be one woman, truly, wholly, is to be all women. Tend one garden and you will birth worlds.

Unfortunately, the more chaotic the society, the greater is the desire for conservative, nonconfrontational art.

Women have waited millions of years, growing separate as another species, with visions and priorities no man-words, no man-measurements can comprehend.

Women are defined by their biography, and men are sacrosanct from their biography.

I have a great ability to improvise verbally and I am very funny on a dime.