“Ach, Tchekov! Why are you dead? Why can’t I talk to you in a big darkish room at late evening—where the light is green from the waving trees outside? I’d like to write a series of Heavens: that would be one.”

— Katherine Mansfield

Source: Journal of Katherine Mansfield

Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Do you have more details about the quote "Ach, Tchekov! Why are you dead? Why can’t I talk to you in a big darkish room at late evening—where the light is green …" by Katherine Mansfield?

Katherine Mansfield 43

New Zealand author 1888–1923

Susanna Kaysen book Girl, Interrupted

Girl, Interrupted (1994)
Context: It’s important to cultivate detachment. One way to do this is to practice imagining yourself dead, or in the process of dying. If there’s a window, you must imagine your body falling out the window. If there’s a knife, you must imagine the knife piercing your skin. If there’s a train coming, you must imagine your torso flattened under its wheels. These exercises are necessary to achieving the proper distance. The motive is paramount. Without a strong motive, you’re sunk. My motives were weak: an American-history paper I didn’t want to write and the question I’d asked months earlier, Why not kill myself? Dead, I wouldn’t have to write the paper. Nor would I have to keep debating the question.

“SHELLEY JACKSON: You began as a writer, moved to performance art, then architecture. I’d like to follow the traces of writing through your career, and see whether your late work could be rethought as a radically materialist practice of writing. What made you want to write?
VITO ACCONCI: I wanted to be involved with the making of some kind of parallel world. I thought, there’s no reason to go to different parts of our world, because you can write them. You can stay home, stay in a little room, and imagine all these worlds. And I wanted to do that. Why did I want to do that, I’m not sure if I can tell.”

Vito Acconci (1940–2017) Designer, landscape architect, performance and installation artist

Shelley Jackson talks with Vito Acconci http://www.believermag.com/issues/200612/?read=interview_acconci, in: The Believer, Nr. 12. 2006.

“Why do I always want to sock it to you hard?
Let you know what love is like when I’m
keeping all my cards up on the shelf
Where you can’t see them
Why do I always want to keep it to myself?”

Zooey Deschanel (1980) American actress, musician, and singer-songwriter

"Over It Over Again".
Volume Two (2010)

“Why can't I write something that would awake the dead? That pursuit is what burns most deeply.”

Patti Smith Just Kids

Source: Just Kids

“Why are the heavens not filled with light? Why is the universe plunged into darkness?”

Edward Robert Harrison (1919–2007) British astronomer

Darkness at Night: a Riddle of the Universe (1987), p. 1

“I am not a big banyan tree; I am a less green bush, the more you cut, the more I grow”

Girija Vyas (1946) Indian politician

Quoted in Sangeeta Barooah Pisharoty, "Poetic identity," http://www.hindu.com/mag/2008/10/19/stories/2008101950080200.htmThe Hindu, India, 19 October 2008