Meia Geddes

“Suffice to say, the dream writer had a way of phrasing things. She could depict the curve of a cucumber, the shape of a sunbeam, the endearing, velvety tilt of a peach, in just such a way that she earned her living selling dreams. One simply made a selection, read it in solitude, and let it percolate till sleep. People swore they fell directly into her renderings, and one even asked if the dream writer could write a dream of dreaming forever. The dream writer could not do this, but she hired dream apprentices to expand the reach of her dreams and she wrote dreams for herself in which she would sit at a desk, pen in hand, and write even more dreams. This nearly doubled her output.”

“I would like to do more in appreciating the mindset of the child. Maybe it has something to do with taking ourselves very seriously and with great disregard, as well as having a healthy does of awe and doubt for all else.”

“I let quiet shape what I say, then realize there is nothing that can be fully said—the reason for gestures and eyes and art. Always something waiting, wanting, expectant, yet also curiously not.”

“The little queen lived in a world where the sky swirled like the sea and nothing was itself for very long. Everything looked to be in brushstrokes.”

“Is it not so presumptuous to write a word? To write a word is to give the word a space all of its own. You build a home for it and hope it can find itself at home among all the other words. Nestled in a new place.”

“A word is a word is another word more beautiful because of the former and the next and the circle and sun they create.”

“Art allows us to die over and over without actually dying. Only we must catch our breath.”

“Cutting down a wall, the wall sawyer could feel the tension in a home ease and something windy rush in circles round her feet. It was addictive, each a sweet victory of art. The tumbling motion of a falling wall was like a volcanic eruption fading into a mountain of roses. The wall sawyer felt a loving animosity toward walls. “You must pay attention to your obsessions, where life and love intersect,” she told the little queen.”

“Maybe all you need to do is find the heartbeat in everything. And if writing is living, the discovery of the beat of a heart, then when you read me, you are living by my side.”

“If I could simply place the various parts of myself into the night sky to occasionally glance up and behold myself—maybe in the end I am only hoping to vicariously soak up some starlight.”

“Whenever she felt at home, there always seemed to be love floating about on the edges of things.”

“I will treat language with resigned delight, embrace it like unrequited love, offer words to you with a kind of secret shame, for I know that sometimes there is such a thing as too much language, and that language can hold a kind of sincerity that is tiresome and overwrought.”