Quotes from Lynda Barry

The groove is so mysterious. We're born with it and we lose it and the world seems to split apart before our eyes into stupid and cool. When we get it back, the world unifies around us, and both stupid and cool fall away. I am grateful to those who are keepers of the groove. The babies and the grandmas who hang on to it and help us remember when we forget that any kind of dancing is better than no dancing at all.

You have to be willing to spend time making things for no known reason.

This ability to exist in pieces is what some adults call resilience. And I suppose in some way it is a kind of resilience, a horrible resilience that makes adults believe children forget trauma.

You may be a lady but you are still the man!

It is true that I am a person with black pockets of evil and hatred in my heart. There are underground places inside of me

The thing I call 'my mind' seems to be kind of like a landlord that doesn't really know its tenants.

When we finish a book, why do we hold it in both hands and gaze at it as if it were somehow alive?

If it is your time, love will track you down like a cruise missile.If you say "No! I don't want it right now," that's when you'll get it for sure. Love will make a way out of no way. Love is an exploding cigar which we willingly smoke.

But when the thing that is scaring you is already Jesus, who are you supposed to pray to?

what is an imaginary friend? are there also imaginary enemies?

You keep seeing your picture on posters that you are missing but you're not. That'd be weird, right? Or say you look down at the sidewalk and earthworms are spelling your name. Or you open a peanut bag and the 'hello' is written in your writing on the inside of the shell. Would that weird ya?

If I could only turn the etch-a-sketch of my life upside down.

something can only become an illusion after disillusionment. before that, it is something real. what caused the disillusionment? no one told me the print on the wall was just ink and paper and had no life of its own. at some point the cat stopped blinking, and i stopped thinking it could.

A man who has been dead for a week in a hot trailer looks more like a man than you would first expect.

Flies die in so many lonely places. -Roberta Rohbeson

Ask a burning question, get a burning answer

What is an idea made of? Of future, past and also meanwhile.

i believe [images] are the soul's immune system and transit system.

He's picked clean! Eaten by cats!

The radio was on and that was the first time I heard that song, the one I hate. Whenever I hear it all I can think of is that very day riding in the front seat with Lucy leaning against me and the smell of Juicy Fruit making me want to throw up. How can a song do that? Be like a net that catches a whole entire day, even a day whose guts you hate? You hear it and all of a sudden everything comes hanging back in front of you, all tangled up in that music.

I am hell with a knife and there is nothing I can really do about it but try and keep my mouth shut and try not to let it show.

gospel singing ... is the rawest, sweetest, uninhibited and exquisite sounds a person can make or hear. It isn't music, it's an entire experience you feel and live. A sound to rise you up again.

We don't create a fantasy world to escape reality. We create it to be able to stay.

We don't create a fantasy world to escape reality, we create it to be able to stay. I believe we have always done this, used images to stand and understand what otherwise would be intolerable.