Quotes by Dana Spiotta

The issue isnt, Am I good enough? No. The issue is, Do I not have any other choice? Will and desire dont matter. Ability doesnt matter. Need is the only thing that matters.

The repetition of the days did something to you. You knew the monotony, but you couldnt fight it. You had to invent your own repetitions to meet it. A ritual. This early, barely awake kneeling was hers.She looked deep into the black of her closed eyes. Stared into the dark. When your sense of vision has very little stimulation, it invents images. Sarah doesnt know the name for this is the Prisoners Cinema. It is a trick of the mind, blindness turned into glorious sight. Isolation turned into hallucination. After enough time, she saw a series of lights. The false images are called phosphenes, which means show of lights. But all Sarah knew was that it gave her vibrant colors of great depth, and patterns like a mosaic, like a tiled church floor or sometimes like the spiral of a shell. These visions would not absolve her of her time, her duty, and her deeds. Instead these visions took her through the limits of who she was and what she had done, and for this she felt gratitude, and with this, at last, consolation.

And if I am comfortable with it, why do I still call it loneliness? Because--and I think somehow she would understand this--you can have and recognize a sadness in your alienation and in other peoples alienation and still not long to be around anyone. I think that if you wonder about other peoples loneliness, or contemplate it at all, youve got a real leg up on being comfortable on your own.

Im thinking about past events. Im interested in recall, exact recall, of what was said, who said it and to whom. I want to know the truth, undistorted by time and revision and wishes and regrets.

That is the thing about films. They dont change. You change. The immutability of the film (or a book or a painting or a piece of music) is something to measure yourself against. That is one of the things a great work of art does. It stays there waiting for you to come back to it, and it shows you who you are now, each time a little different.