She wants him to remind her what she said just now when she woke up. She sometimes speaks when she’s still half-asleep, and then when she’s fully awake can’t remember what she said. But this time she recalls quite clearly a woman’s voice similar to her own, and some complicated, painful words torn out of her own flesh, words which she hadn’t quite understood and which made her cry.
— Marguerite Duras, Blue Eyes, Black Hair (tr. B. Bray)
Posted in Marguerite Duras
‘You disorient me, but what do I know? I speak, I shape and scatter you like clouds in the wind, look around stupidly and wonder what I’ve said.’
Posted in Writing
‘You take me to where I wasn’t, where I’m not and where I won’t be, joyfully.’
Posted in Writing
‘I talk to you, turn away, turn back and away again, admit I can’t dispense with you. I ask if you can dispense with me and laughter rises from mouths, mountains, trees and lakes…’
Posted in Writing
‘It’s in the failure of my words that you reveal yourself – but this is wrong. It’s in the failure to name and the failure to name the failure to name that you reveal yourself – wrong again. I backtrack into my own backtracking and have to laugh; you unsay yourself from inside yourself, from inside me.’
Posted in Writing
‘You’re water that flows out of itself, away from itself. Where’s your spring, where’s mine? You flow into me, away from me.’
Posted in Writing
I tell X I could be walking through some gleaming seaside village under a serene sky, I could be dreaming under a lone oak tree, calm and content, instead of letting him get to me. Get off me, I say, you’re like a needy dog, you bore me, I’m violently bored.
Posted in Writing
‘I fell back in the hole. It got deeper and wider, I could hardly see the light. I looked down and it closed up.’
Posted in Writing
‘I name you “you” and am instantly led astray, already guilty. I backtrack from my naming and my backtracking itself leads me astray. Are you behind me or ahead of me? I deny you, pretend it never happened, but it’s too late. There’s no I to go back to, no I without you. As a last resort I imagine I fall silent and let you name me, and have to laugh. Now I have nothing to defend, but my defences remain.’
Posted in Writing
Have I spoken or announced anything worthy of God? Rather I feel that I have done nothing but wish to speak: if I have spoken, I have not said what I wished to say.
— Augustine (quoted in Sells, Mystical Languages of Unsaying)
Posted in Augustine, Michael Sells
Notes from a Room 