Lynda Barry: Genius

There are certain children who are told they are too sensitive, and there are certain adults who believe sensitivity is a problem that can be fixed in the way that crooked teeth can be fixed and made straight. And when these two come together you get a fairytale, a kind of story with hopelessness in it.

I believe there is something in these old stories that does what singing does to words. They have transformational capabilities, in the way melody can transform mood.

They can't transform your actual situation, but they can transform your experience of it. We don't create a fantasy world to escape reality, we create it to be able to stay. I believe we have always done this, used images to stand and understand what otherwise would be intolerable.
― Lynda Barry, What It Is

Dear Anyone Who Finds This, Do not blame the drugs.
― Lynda Barry, Cruddy

No matter what, expect the unexpected. And whenever possible BE the unexpected.
― Lynda Barry, Cruddy

Love is an exploding cigar we willingly smoke.
― Lynda Barry

We don’t create a fantasy world to escape reality, we create it to be able to stay.
― Lynda Barry

This ability to exist in pieces is what some adults call resilience. And I suppose in some way it is a kind of resilience, a horrible resilience that makes adults believe children forget trauma.
― Lynda Barry, One Hundred Demons

You have to be willing to spend time making things for no known reason.
― Lynda Barry, Picture This: The Near-sighted Monkey Book

You may be a lady but you are still the man!
― Lynda Barry, The Lynda Barry Experience

The groove is so mysterious. We're born with it and we lose it and the world seems to split apart before our eyes into stupid and cool. When we get it back, the world unifies around us, and both stupid and cool fall away.
I am grateful to those who are keepers of the groove. The babies and the grandmas who hang on to it and help us remember when we forget that any kind of dancing is better than no dancing at all.
― Lynda Barry, One Hundred Demons

If it is your time, love will track you down like a cruise missile.If you say "No! I don't want it right now," that's when you'll get it for sure. Love will make a way out of no way. Love is an exploding cigar which we willingly smoke.
― Lynda Barry

What year is it in your imagination?
― Lynda Barry, What It Is

What is an imaginary friend? Are there also imaginary enemies?
― Lynda Barry, What It Is

It is true that I am a person with black pockets of evil and hatred in my heart. There are underground places inside of me.
― Lynda Barry, Cruddy

The thing I call ‘my mind’ seems to be kind of like a landlord that doesn’t really know its tenants.
― Lynda Barry, What It Is

“But when the thing that is scaring you is already Jesus, who are you supposed to pray to?”
― Lynda Barry, Cruddy

“You keep seeing your picture on posters that you are missing but you're not. That'd be weird, right? Or say you look down at the sidewalk and earthworms are spelling your name. Or you open a peanut bag and the 'hello' is written in your writing on the inside of the shell. Would that weird ya?”
― Lynda Barry

If I could only turn the etch-a-sketch of my life upside down.
― Lynda Barry, My Perfect Life

When we finish a book, why do we hold it in both hands and gaze at it as if it were somehow alive?
― Lynda Barry, One Hundred Demons

The radio was on and that was the first time I heard that song, the one I hate. Whenever I hear it all I can think of is that very day riding in the front seat with Lucy leaning against me and the smell of Juicy Fruit making me want to throw up. How can a song do that? Be like a net that catches a whole entire day, even a day whose guts you hate? You hear it and all of a sudden everything comes hanging back in front of you, all tangled up in that music.
― Lynda Barry

He's picked clean! Eaten by cats!
― Lynda Barry

“Flies die in so many lonely places.-Roberta Rohbeson”
― Lynda Barry

Something can only become an illusion after disillusionment. before that, it is something real. what caused the disillusionment? no one told me the print on the wall was just ink and paper and had no life of its own. at some point the cat stopped blinking, and i stopped thinking it could.
― Lynda Barry, What It Is

A man who has been dead for a week in a hot trailer looks more like a man than you would first expect.
― Lynda Barry, Cruddy

What if she stepped on a needle and it went right into her foot and Roberta would not feel it and the needle would rise and rise and rise through the veins leading up to the heart and then the needle would STAB HER IN THE HEART and Roberta would DIE and it would be VERY PAINFUL this according to nurse mother a medical expert on Freaky Ways to Croak... The mother shouted that she knew several people who died from the Rising Stab of the Unfelt Needle or RSUN she has seen cases of it many times and not ONE PERSON HAS SURVIVED IT.
― Lynda Barry, Cruddy

At the center of everything we call 'the arts,' and children call 'play,' is something which seems somehow alive.
― Lynda Barry, What It Is

Ask a burning question, get a burning answer.
― Lynda Barry, Cruddy

Are memories pictures or the secret doorway?
― Lynda Barry, What It Is

I am hell with a knife and there is nothing I can really do about it but try and keep my mouth shut and try not to let it show.
― Lynda Barry, Cruddy

But paper and ink have conjuring abilities of their own. Arrangements of lines and shapes, of letters and words on a series of pages make a world we can dwell and travel in.
― Lynda Barry, What It Is

I believe [images] are the soul's immune system and transit system.
― Lynda Barry, What It Is