Rubicon Beach
Steve Erickson
Top 10 Best Quotes
“I began composing the next poem, the one that was to be written next. Not the last poem of those I had read, but the poem written in the head of someone who may never have existed but who had certainly written another poem nonetheless, and just never had the chance to commit it to ink and the page.”
“By the plain form of my delirium I will blast the obstruction of every form around me into something barely called shadow. I sail. I swim to you. I know the water.”
“It is in the land of dreamers, it is in the land the dreamers dream that dreams of justice and desire are as certain as numbers. It is in the land of insomniacs that justice and desire are dismissed as merely dreams. I was born in the first land and returned to the second: they were one and the same. You know its name.”
“America One," came Wade's voice from the big shadow, "or America Two?”
“Identity was something known in a way utterly removed from the vessel that carried it.”
“I kept the poems in the tower with my hoarded documents of murders. I was constructing my own house of conscience with the transgressions of conscience on exhibit. I found myself poring over the verses for days and nights trying to break their code.”
“He held to it in the way of a man who holds the string of a kite that is so high he can’t see it anymore, knowing that any moment it may break and the only way he will know it has broken will be by the sudden ripple of the string as it dances slowly groundward.”
“He closed her eyes and she slept. The people of the Crowd watched her, while somewhere else sailors read the memory of her face, the compass of mazes.”
“After her mother had disappeared, six-year-old Cutter began to have dreams. They were troubling dreams at first, inhabited by strange animals, tigers, jackals. Later dreams would seem like messengers with a single animal, a squirrel, a heron, creatures which did not bring terror into the night with them. When she was in her teens Cutter spent a dime at a carnival to have her palm read. The turbaned gypsy, faux or no, stroked a long painted nail along a smooth-banked river flowing across the luxuriant landscape of Cutter's hand and predicted such visitations as had already intruded into the girl's life.”
“I got out late winter. I was off on the exact day by thirty-some hours, which is not bad calculations. I made the decision when I went in to keep track of the days, for the simple reason that it was the intention of my jailers to jettison my sense of time and place. They brought you in a metal truck with no windows and took you out in the same truck or one damned similar. The rumor was that Bell Federal Penitentiary was somewhere in the plains of the Montana-Saskatchewan annex. The sight from my cell would not have refuted this. The white of the snow and sky filled my eyes like the sheet pulled over the head of a dead man. If it was not Montana-Saskatchewan, then it was the North Pole, or the moon. It was a signal to anyone who's ever doubted the terror of an idea that almost all of us in this prison that had no time or place were utterly guiltless of a violent act, unless one counts the violence of tongues.”
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Book Keywords:
fantasy, beginnings, poetry, myth
