Nell Zink Quotes

#1. Nell Zink is a writer of extraordinary talent and range. Her work insistently raises the possibility that the world is larger and stranger than the world you think you know.

Jonathan Franzen

#2. There was no circumcision. Lee said circumcision was dreamed up by moralists and lotion salesmen to make hand jobs chafe, and Peggy deferred to his better judgement.

Nell Zink

#3. They should build a monument," Cary said. "All the times I got my ass beat to a pulp so the youth of today could get dolled up like faggots to go out in public.

Nell Zink

#4. She had read enough lives of the poetesses to know all about inpatient psychiatric care.

Nell Zink

#5. What is a poem, if not a toy mouse viewed from an angle that makes it appear to take over the world? Lee

Nell Zink

#6. I never take pictures. Skies are much larger in reminiscences and my friends are much better-looking. Photos crop reality into little squares; instead, I have very good binoculars.

Nell Zink

#7. (why exactly twenty-somethings are considered so vital to protest movements, I never figured out, seeing as how they never vote and have no money)

Nell Zink

#8. Why shouldn't loving puppets be a revolutionary act, in a world where so many people love drone warfare?

Nell Zink

#9. She was young the way an actual young person is young.

Nell Zink

#10. From the passenger seat the wallcreeper said, "Twee.

Nell Zink

#11. I had to do something, because the minute I broke up with Elvis, I fell in love with him.

Nell Zink

#12. Twee," the wallcreeper remarked. "Twee!

Nell Zink

#13. As I was to learn, reproductive urges will serve as an alibi for just about anything.

Nell Zink

#14. For jobs and men, it's a seller's market. There are no other fish in the sea.

Nell Zink

#15. As a writer, she was struggling. As an accomplice to the wholesale drug trade, she was setting new benchmarks for excellence in felony crime. The

Nell Zink

#16. I wanted to hear my own whispers in the next room and know that I was thinking of me.

Nell Zink

#17. You could take winos off the sidewalk in front of the drugstore and teach them to be poets in half an hour.

Nell Zink

#18. I really like writing in English, and it's the best job I've ever had.

Nell Zink

#19. As a speller he was adrift in a no-man's-land between phonetic and dyslexic.

Nell Zink

#20. People wanted to get me published, and my early work was so weird that they weren't getting anywhere. I thought, okay, I'll do something that's just a tad more normal.

Nell Zink

#21. College girls on the road! One-night stands! Lee felt like an Austro-Hungarian emperor attended on his deathbed by flappers. He felt them stealing his life - literally going back in time and taking, through their incoherent lifestyles, the little he had struggled so hard to attain.

Nell Zink

#22. And the black box in her arms whimpered itself to sleep with longing to be a normal person who is chosen, not a special person who is discovered. To be the kind of duck who gets included by wild swans

Nell Zink

#23. You're a cis-het dude-bro on strike for better conditions.

Nell Zink

#24. It's a digital e-cigarette." "What's digital about it?" "You hold it in your fingers, like this." "I'm serious. Is it part of the Internet of things? Do they know when you're smoking it?" "I don't think so. I think they just mean it works on electricity.

Nell Zink

#25. I saw that I had followed the chief guiding principle of the petty bourgeoisie in modernity and made a virtue of necessity in telling myself my husband was a good lover.

Nell Zink

#26. If and when family planning is the responsibility of females, males are best kept under lock and key.

Nell Zink

#27. You can ascend to the region of blue sky and great wandering shadows. The shelter that received the risen Christ and Port in The Sheltering Sky, that comforted the mortally wounded Prince Andrei and the young W. E. B. Du Bois.

Nell Zink

#28. Besides, adulthood is never something girls grow into. It is something they have thrust upon them, menstruation being only the first of many two-edged swords subsumed under the rubric "becoming a woman," all of them occasions to stay home from school and weep.

Nell Zink

#29. Lee explained to her that art for art's sake is an upper-class aesthetic. To create art divorced from any purpose, you can't be living a life driven by need and desire.

Nell Zink

#30. There are terrible things that never get easier, and there are things even more terrible that get easier with time and repetition.

Nell Zink

#31. What's important is the tolerance. If people are not beating other people up, or shooting them for being different, then that's progress. Even if the ideas that go through their head are fodder for novelists.

Nell Zink

#32. Fatherhood surprised him pleasantly. As a male he assumed no unpleasant duties would accrue to him. He would be responsible for teaching the child conversational skills once it reached its teens.

Nell Zink

#33. Her social position at Safeway was better than it was at home.

Nell Zink

#34. She would see that in England, for reasons unknown, a woman can simultaneously be cute as a bug's ear, a serious rose gardener, and a nymphomaniac.

Nell Zink

#35. I have known many people who were seduced as children by same-sex partners and then spent their teen years being gay, and then found their way back to heterosexuality as adults.

Nell Zink

#36. So many men, so little parking.

Nell Zink

#37. The interesting artists I know are the ones doing political work. The most interesting people I know are the people who care about politics.

Nell Zink

#38. I'm enough of an anarchist aesthetically, when it comes to art - I want people to be reading my stuff voluntarily. They should be doing it because they want to.

Nell Zink

#39. My social status in the last year has gone from zero to hero.

Nell Zink

#40. Meg felt her heart constrict. There was so much she wanted to say to him. Things any normal mother would say, like that a one-handed backhand is more versatile.

Nell Zink

#41. Peggy had not forgotten the intellectual and social ambitions she had started life with only a decade before. Years so weary and routine laden, they seemed like a single year that had repeated itself. She wanted to be creative and self-reliant.

Nell Zink

#42. If you have to be bad, be so bad sympathetic hearers just shake their heads and give up. Nobody

Nell Zink

#43. Whatever I was writing at the time, I knew there was no market for it and never would be, because there's never a market for true art, so my main concern was always to have a job that didn't require me to write or think.

Nell Zink

#44. In the rural South, the only interesting people were the sexual deviants. Everybody else was able to be part of the mainstream, and could find a way somehow.

Nell Zink

#45. Gradually her fear faded to the existential angst that incessantly haunts all mankind in modernity.

Nell Zink

#46. then decided maybe something was wrong with Sundays. He tried Saturday and saw about two thousand

Nell Zink

#47. the heartrending petty bourgeois piteousness of cucumber sandwiches passed around by accounting majors whose overly colorful bow ties had been expressly chosen to keep them from looking like waiters.

Nell Zink

#48. I'd say it's never a challenge to present white and heteronormative privilege. The hard thing is to write any other way.

Nell Zink

#49. it's the stories we tell ourselves that cause all the problems. If you look reality straight in the eye, you end up a lot less confused.

Nell Zink

#50. I felt like the Empress Theodora. Can I get more orifices? I thought. Is that what she meant in the Historia Arcana - not that three isn't enough, but that the three on offer aren't enough to sustain a marriage?

Nell Zink

#51. Human beings are just way more complex than they'd like to be. They like to be simple machines. And they'll set up fantasy scenarios where they're simple machines, and get hurt and do things they regret.

Nell Zink

#52. It was a pastiche of public library porn from Irving Stone to Philip Roth.

Nell Zink

#53. When the past is hard to explain, it's best to concentrate on the future.

Nell Zink

#54. (It was accepted practice to let your husband camp out in summer near a source of sweet wine and steaks past their sell-by date, but you had to take him back in winter.)

Nell Zink

#55. The library, like the thrift shop, specialised in the leavings of the elderly dead.

Nell Zink

#56. He informed Byrdie that his social engineering ambitions betrayed all the delusions of grandeur that you might expect from the son of a poet.

Nell Zink

#57. It was like giving a Jewish kid a coffee-table book about Auschwitz.

Nell Zink

#58. She simply knew she was about to lose something valuable, and like anybody else, she wanted to take the next logical step to make it her own: She wanted to fuck it.

Nell Zink