Brute Quotes

“What is this impulse in me to worship & crucify
anyone who leaves me—”
― Emily Skaja, Brute: Poems

“If ghost, if whore, if virgin—same origin story:

because X was a face too lovely, Y was a corpse in the lake.”
― Emily Skaja, Brute: Poems

“How many implements of shame should I hold against

myself?”
― Emily Skaja, Brute: Poems

“We're almost a whole shadow now from far away.”
― Emily Skaja, Brute: Poems

“He said I didn't want to tell you
to wait for me (But wait for me)”
― Emily Skaja, Brute: Poems

“Done with the whole dark
& the insect dirge
under blue lit lamps.
Done trying to remember

June, first stars & August
when I was Penelope
when I was Eurydice
when July was missing

& I was my own dull shade.”
― Emily Skaja, Brute: Poems

“I know what to do
with the dark.”
― Emily Skaja, Brute: Poems

“Oh hawk, what's your damage—
are you here to pick the bones

of the years I laid waste to
like I never loved a thing? So be it.”
― Emily Skaja, Brute: Poems

“as if my own voice
could return me

to myself.”
― Emily Skaja, Brute: Poems

“It's not anyone's fault that this world is full of omens.
By all accounts, history is a practice

of ignoring things & hoping for the best. You can drive
yourself crazy with looking. You can expect

bad luck to mark you unfooled, fooled.
Light to mark you with light.”
― Emily Skaja, Brute: Poems

“I said I never want to survive that story again”
― Emily Skaja, Brute: Poems

“Don't tell me the sun is an exit

the sky is a clamp.”
― Emily Skaja, Brute: Poems

“I have just this one heart okay I was burned I was gaslit nearly to ash on the first try
From the start I was told I was a powerful speaker I was told when & how I should speak
It's true I made a feast of my own misery I invited everyone the whole gang”
― Emily Skaja, Brute: Poems

“My mind is a wishbone drying. I hold it taut & pull to break.”
― Emily Skaja, Brute: Poems

“Understand I need these fragments. To tell it once is not enough.
I have a hundred holy objects, everything looked upon, to break.

Time will pass, time will pass me, attaching mile-marker threats

to every causeway.”
― Emily Skaja, Brute: Poems

“unfull but full of loathing”
― Emily Skaja, Brute: Poems

“Underneath

every pattern is a logic

it's your privilege to ignore

& yours is dreamsense yours is erasure”
― Emily Skaja, Brute: Poems

“Hello you

are a vessel of vessels.”
― Emily Skaja, Brute: Poems

“Compromised by longing & looking for language

to note the differences in the map: the pointed spruces
tipped against the moon this time

& the water halflit, star-slid—but it makes no difference
in the telling.”
― Emily Skaja, Brute: Poems

“but I can stand here reciting all the words I have
over the hole & that's what's left—”
― Emily Skaja, Brute: Poems

“Listen to me, I'm not hiding it—
I'm swimming out to meet the boats
coming armed up the river

& I wish he were watching
through a lead-black fog.
I had his book of exits learned by heart.
I thought I knew it.”
― Emily Skaja, Brute: Poems

“If I loved someone like that. A figure of questionable authority
figuring out which relics to preserve under cling wrap.

For the way he smelled like cedar. Mispronounced the names of plants.”
― Emily Skaja, Brute: Poems

“Sharon:
innocent freckle-faced red-haired
good Sharon:
I was a vicious, vengeful compulsive BRUTE to you at school.
30+ years on-Now I'm very sorry”
― Frank Warren, PostSecret: Extraordinary Confessions from Ordinary Lives

“And in that tenderness I even asked myself why I should save her from the Brute, or warn her against the Brute, or meddle with the matter at all. ‘She is happy,’ said my heart. ‘Whether it’s madness or a god or a monster, or whatever it is, she is happy. You have seen that yourself. She is ten times happier, there in the Mountain, than you could ever make her. Leave her alone. Don’t spoil it. Don’t mar what you’ve learnt you can’t make.”
― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces

“I had no idea punching was so fraught with peril.'

'Apparently, it takes brains to be a brute.”
― Sarah J. Maas, A ​Court of Silver Flames

“New inadequate gestures of suffering Chimeric thing”
― Emily Skaja, Brute: Poems

“The would-be brute, by dreaming of medieval bloodbaths, finds himself uninterested in mere parking lot brawls and the would-be lothario, by dreaming of Sadean spoilations, loses his interest in venturing so mild a thing as an unsolicited kiss. In this way, dreams offer us all those things which our lives deny and by their extravagance, dull our daily denials.”
― Michael Shindler

“Blue river nameless, sky blank, pointless”
― Emily Skaja, Brute: Poems

“She messages me, expecting me to reply.
But, I don't reply.

N.B: I can be a brute at times.”
― Avijeet Das

“So what if the world loses another brute to war? Good riddance.'

Cassian smiled slowly. 'Thanks for your well-wishes, Eris.”
― Sarah J. Maas, A ​Court of Silver Flames