Book//mark – The Hearing Trumpet | Leonora Carrington, 1950

“When Carmella gave me the present of a hearing trumpet she may have foreseen some of the consequences. Carmella is not what I would call malicious, she just happens to have a curious sense of humour.”

“Not only will you be able to sit and listen to beautiful music and intelligent conversation but you will also have the privilege of being able to spy on what your whole family are saying about you, and that ought to be very amusing.”

“People under seventy and over seven are very unreliable if they are not cats.”

“These women that are shut up in a sanctuary for senile women.”

“I am never lonely… Or rather I never suffer from loneliness. I suffer much from the idea that my loneliness might be taken away from me by a lot of mercilessly well meaning people.”

“Souvenirs from the far past rose like bubbles in my mind.”

“It is impossible to understand how millions and millions of people all obey a sickly collection of gentlemen that call themselves ‘Government!’ The word, I expect, frightens people. It is a form of planetary hypnosis, and very unhealthy.”

“You cannot overcome so many psychic deformities in a short space of time. You are not alone as victim of your degenerate habits, everyone has faults!”

“She stalked off with a certain creaking elegance.”

“First impressions are never very clear, I can only say there seemed to be several courtyards, cloisters, stagnant fountains, trees, shrubs, lawns. The main building was in fact a castle, surrounded by various pavilions with incongruous shapes. Pixielike dwellings shaped like toadstools, Swiss chalets, railway carriages, one or two ordinary bungalows, something shaped like a boot, another like what I took to be an outsize Egyptian mummy. It was all so very strange that I for once doubted the accuracy of my observation.”

“Old age is actually the only time in life when we can finally be ourselves, without worrying about the demands of others or conforming to the social norms that we have been constantly instructed to follow.”

“Writes letters all over the world to people she has never met and signs them with all sorts of romantic names, never her own.”

“Surrealism is no longer considered modern today and almost every village rectory and girl’s school have surrealist pictures hanging on their walls. Even Buckingham Palace has a large reproduction of Magritte’s famous slice of ham with an eye peering out. It hangs, I believe, in the throne room.”

“At times I had thought of writing poetry myself but getting words to rhyme with each other is difficult, like trying to drive a herd of turkeys and kangaroos down a crowded thoroughfare and keep them neatly together without looking in shop windows.”

“The woods are full of wild anemones now, shall we go? No Darling, I didn’t say wild enemas, I said wild anemones…”

‘Institutions, in fact, are not allowed to like anything. They don’t have time.’ ‘What shall I do?’ I said. ‘It seems a pity to commit suicide when I have lived for ninety-two years and really haven’t understood anything.’ ‘You might escape to Lapland,’ said Carmella.”

“This is how the Goddess reclaimed her Holy Cup with an army of bees, wolves, seven old women, a postman, a Chinaman, a poet, an atom-driven Ark, and a were-woman. The strangest army, perhaps, ever seen on this planet.”

“Ice ages pass, and although the world is frozen over we suppose someday grass and flowers will grow again. In the meantime I keep a daily record on three wax tablets.

After I die Anubeth’s werecubs will continue the document, till the planet is peopled with cats, werewolves, bees and goats. We all fervently hope this will be an improvement on humanity, which deliberately renounced the Pneuma of the Goddess.”

“You may not believe in magic but something very strange is happening at this
very moment. Your head has dissolved into thin air and I can see the rhododendrons
through your stomach. It’s not that you are dead or anything dramatic like that, it is
simply that you are fading away and I can’t even remember your name.”

“One has to be careful what one takes when one goes away forever.”

“There is nobody that can make you happy, you must take care of this matter yourself.”

“I often feel I am being burned at the stake just because I have always refused to give up
that wonderful strange power I have inside me that becomes manifested when I am
in harmonious communication with some other inspired being.”

“How delightful it would be to find a few people, or even one person, unconditionally
thrilled by what one had to say. I imagined telling an excited audience Parrot stories
for hours on end without anyone interrupting or yawning.”

“Do not give up hope entirely in spite of the horror of your situation. I am
mobilising all my mental capacities to obtain your unconditional freedom.”

“Darling stop being philosophical it doesn’t suit you, it makes your nose red.”

“I never eat meat as I think it is wrong to deprive animals of their life when
they are so difficult to chew anyway”

“Houses are really bodies. We connect ourselves with walls, roofs, and objects just as
we hang on to our livers, skeletons, flesh and bloodstream. I am no beauty, no mirror
is necessary to assure me of this absolute fact. Nevertheless I have a death grip on this
haggard frame as if it were the limpid body of Venus herself.”

“It is impossible to understand how millions and millions of people all obey a sickly
collection of gentlemen that call themselves ‘Government!’ The word, I expect,
frightens people. It is a form of planetary hypnosis, and very unhealthy.”
“It has been going on for years,” I said. “And it only occurred to relatively few to
disobey and make what they call revolutions. If they won their revolutions, which
they occasionally did, they made more governments, sometimes more cruel and
stupid than the last.”

“Men are very difficult to understand,” said Carmella. “Let’s hope they all freeze to
death. I am sure it would be very pleasant and healthy for human beings to have no
authority whatever. They would have to think for themselves, instead of always being
told what to do and think by advertisements, cinemas, policemen, and parliaments.”

“If I remember correctly writers usually find some excuse for their books, although
why one should excuse oneself for having such a quiet and peaceful occupation I really
don’t know. Military people never seem to apologize for killing each other yet novelists
feel ashamed for writing some nice inert paper book that is not certain to be read
by anybody.”

“Wouldn’t it be wonderful if I won a helicopter in a crossword puzzle competition?
There is not much hope though I am afraid, as they never give such practical prizes.”

“This is the really incomprehensible side of humanity, people never have time for anything.”