“For me, forgiveness and compassion are always linked: how do we hold people accountable for wrongdoing and yet at the same time remain in touch with their humanity enough to believe in their capacity to be transformed?”

“I will not have my life narrowed down. I will not bow down to somebody else’s whim or to someone else’s ignorance.”

“As all advocates of feminist politics know most people do not understand sexism or if they do they think it is not a problem. Masses of people think that feminism is always and only about women seeking to be equal to men. And a huge majority of these folks think feminism is anti-male. Their misunderstanding of feminist politics reflects the reality that most folks learn about feminism from patriarchal mass media.”

“I still think it’s important for people to have a sharp, ongoing critique of marriage in patriarchal society — because once you marry within a society that remains patriarchal, no matter how alternative you want to be within your unit, there is still a culture outside you that will impose many, many values on you whether you want them to or not. “

“Think of all the women you know who will not allow themselves to be seen without makeup. I often wonder how they feel about themselves at night when they are climbing into bed with intimate partners. Are they overwhelmed with secret shame that someone sees them as they really are? Or do they sleep with rage that who they really are can be celebrated or cared for only in secret?”

“Genuine love is rarely an emotional space where needs are instantly gratified. To know love we have to invest time and commitment…’dreaming that love will save us, solve all our problems or provide a steady state of bliss or security only keeps us stuck in wishful fantasy, undermining the real power of the love — which is to transform us.’ Many people want love to function like a drug, giving them an immediate and sustained high. They want to do nothing, just passively receive the good feeling.”

“There are times when personal experience keeps us from reaching the mountain top and so we let it go because the weight of it is too heavy. And sometimes the mountain top is difficult to reach with all our resources, factual and confessional, so we are just there, collectively grasping, feeling the limitations of knowledge, longing together, yearning for a way to reach that highest point. Even this yearning is a way to know.”

“The transformative power of love is not fully embraced in our society because we often wrongly believe that torment and anguish are our ‘natural’ condition.”

I am passionate about everything in my life–first and foremost, passionate about ideas. And that’s a dangerous person to be in this society, not just because I’m a woman, but because it’s such a fundamentally anti-intellectual, anti-critical thinking society.

“Justice demands integrity. It’s to have a moral universe — not only know what is right or wrong but to put things in perspective, weigh things. Justice is different from violence and retribution; it requires complex accounting.”

“Even the most subjected person has moments of rage and resentment so intense that they respond, they act against. There is an inner uprising that leads to rebellion, however short- lived. It may be only momentary but it takes place. That space within oneself where resistance is possible remains.”

“The time has come to tell the truth. Again. There is no love without justice. Men and women who cannot be just deny themselves and everyone they choose to be intimate with the freedom to know mutual love. If we remain unable to imagine a world where love can be recognized as a unifying principle that can lead us to seek and use power wisely, then we will remain wedded to a culture of domination that requires us to choose power over love.”

“Power feminism is just another scam in which women get to play patriarchs and pretend that the power we seek and gain liberates us.”

” Revolutionary feminism embraces men who are able to change, who are capable of responding mutually in a subject-to-subject encounter where desire and fulfillment are in no way linked to coercive subjugation. This feminist vision of the sexual imaginary is the space few men seem able to enter.”

“It’s easier for the former masters to put aside the masks that hid their humanity than for the former slaves to recognise the faces underneath. Or to trust that this is not a new mask these are wearing.”

“You think because he doesn’t love you that you are worthless. You think that because he doesn’t want you anymore that he is right — that his judgment and opinion of you are correct. If he throws you out, then you are garbage. You think he belongs to you because you want to belong to him. Don’t. It’s a bad word, ‘belong.’ Especially when you put it with somebody you love. Love shouldn’t be like that. Did you ever see the way the clouds love a mountain? They circle all around it; sometimes you can’t even see the mountain for the clouds. But you know what? You go up top and what do you see? His head. The clouds never cover the head. His head pokes through, because the clouds let him; they don’t wrap him up. They let him keep his head up high, free, with nothing to hide him or bind him. You can’t own a human being. You can’t lose what you don’t own. Suppose you did own him. Could you really love somebody who was absolutely nobody without you? You really want somebody like that? Somebody who falls apart when you walk out the door? You don’t, do you? And neither does he. You’re turning over your whole life to him. Your whole life, girl. And if it means so little to you that you can just give it away, hand it to him, then why should it mean any more to him? He can’t value you more than you value yourself.”

“There is a loneliness that can be rocked. Arms crossed, knees drawn up, holding, holding on, this motion, unlike a ship’s, smoothes and contains the rocker. It’s an inside kind–wrapped tight like skin. Then there is the loneliness that roams. No rocking can hold it down. It is alive. On its own. A dry and spreading thing that makes the sound of one’s own feet going seem to come from a far-off place.”

“The systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties for menace and subjugation. Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge. Whether it is obscuring state language or the faux-language of mindless media; whether it is the proud but calcified language of the academy or the commodity driven language of science; whether it is the malign language of law-without-ethics, or language designed for the estrangement of minorities, hiding its racist plunder in its literary cheek – it must be rejected, altered and exposed. It is the language that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind. Sexist language, racist language, theistic language – all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas.”

“Anger is better. There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of worth. It is a lovely surging.”

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Toni Morrison quotes by Toni Morrison

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(showing 51-100 of 211)

“In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.”

— Toni Morrison

tags: politics

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“They encouraged you to put some of your weight in their hands and soon as you felt how light and lovely it was, they studied your scars and tribulations…”

— Toni Morrison (Beloved)

tags: love

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“You can’t own a human being. You can’t lose what you don’t own. Suppose you did own him. Could you really love somebody who was absolutely nobody without you? You really want somebody like that? Somebody who falls apart when you walk out the door? You don’t, do you? And neither does he. You’re turning over your whole life to him. Your whole life, girl. And if it means so little to you that you can just give it away, hand it to him, then why should it mean any more to him? he can’t value you more than you value yourself.”

— Toni Morrison (Song of Solomon)

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“I didn’t plan on either children or writing. Once I realized that writing satisfied me in some enormous way, I had to make adjustments. The writing was always marginal in terms of time when the children were small. But it was major in terms of my head. I always thought that women could do a lot of things. All the women I knew did nine or ten things at one time. I always understood that women worked, they went to church, they managed their houses, they managed somebody else’s houses, they raised their children, they raised somebody else’s children, they taught. I wouldn’t say it’s not hard, but why wouldn’t it be? All important things are hard.”

— Toni Morrison

tags: art, feminism, writing

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“I’m not entangled in shaping my work according to other people’s views of how I should have done it.”

— Toni Morrison

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“…the change was adjustment without improvement.”

— Toni Morrison (The Bluest Eye)

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“When am I happy and when am I sad and what is the difference? What do I need to know to stay alive? What is true in the world”

— Toni Morrison

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“What’s the world for you if you can’t make it up the way you want it?”

— Toni Morrison (Jazz)

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“Young people, Lord. Do they still call it infatuation? That magic ax that chops away the world in one blow, leaving only the couple standing there trembling? Whatever they call it, it leaps over anything, takes the biggest chair, the largest slice, rules the ground wherever it walks, from a mansion to a swamp, and its selfishness is its beauty. Before I was reduced to singsong, I saw all kinds of mating. Most are two-night stands trying to last a season. Some, the riptide ones, claim exclusive right to the real name, even though everybody drowns in its wake. People with no imagination feed it with sex—the clown of love. They don’t know the real kinds, the better kinds, where losses are cut and everybody benefits. It takes a certain intelligence to love like that—softly, without props. But the world is such a showpiece, maybe that’s why folks try to outdo it, put everything they feel onstage just to prove they can think up things too: handsome scary things like fights to the death, adultery, setting sheets afire. They fail, of course. The world outdoes them every time. While they are busy showing off, digging other people’s graves, hanging themselves on a cross, running wild in the streets, cherries are quietly turning from greed to red, oysters are suffering pearls, and children are catching rain in their mouths expecting the drops to be cold but they’re not; they are warm and smell like pineapple before they get heavier and heavier, so heavy and fast they can’t be caught one at a time. Poor swimmers head for shore while strong ones wait for lightning’s silver veins. Bottle-green clouds sweep in, pushing the rain inland where palm trees pretend to be shocked by the wind. Women scatter shielding their hair and men bend low holding the women’s shoulders against their chests. I run too, finally. I say finally because I do like a good storm. I would be one of those people in the weather channel leaning into the wind while lawmen shout in megaphones: ‘Get moving!”

“Guileless and without vanity, we were still in love with ourselves then. We felt comfortable in our own skins, enjoyed the news that our senses released to us, admired our dirt, cultivated our scars, and could not comprehend this unworthiness.”

“She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It’s good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.”

“They seemed to have taken all of their smoothly cultivated ignorance, their exquisitely learned self-hatred, their elaborately designed hopelessness and sucked it all up into a fiery cone of scorn that had burned for ages in the hollows of their minds – cooled – and spilled over lips of outrage, consuming whatever was in its path.”

“There was once a man who lost his shadow. I forget what happened to him, but it was dreadful. As for me, I’ve lost my own image. I did not look at it often; but it was there, in the background, just as Maurice had drawn it for me. A straightforward, genuine, “authentic” woman, with out mean-mindedness, uncompromising, but at the same time understanding, indulgent, sensitive, deeply feeling, intensely aware of things and of people, passionately devoted to those she loved and creating happiness for them. A fine life, serene, full, “harmonious.” It is dark: I cannot see myself anymore. And what do the others see? Maybe something hideous.”

“–There you are. The sight of the changing world is miraculous and heartbreaking, both at the same time.
–But so it is for me too. The heartbreaking side of growing old is not in the things around one but in oneself.”

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

Novelist Margaret Atwood asked women what was their greatest fear concerning men. The most common reply: A man might kill them. When she asked men to confide to her their greatest fear concerning women, the most common response: A woman might laugh at them.

This business of making people conscious of what is happening outside their own small circle is one of the major problems of our time, and a new literary technique will have to be evolved to meet it. Considering that the people of this country are not having a very comfortable time, you can’t perhaps, blame them for being somewhat callous about suffering elsewhere, but the remarkable thing is the extent to which they manage to be unaware of it. Tales of starvation, ruined cities, concentration camps, mass deportations, homeless refugees, persecuted Jews — all this is received with a sort of incurious surprise, as though such things had never been heard of but at the same time were not particularly interesting. The now-familiar photographs of skeleton-like children make very little impression. As time goes on and the horrors pile up, the mind seems to secrete a sort of self-protecting ignorance which needs a harder and harder shock to pierce it, just as the body will become immunized to a drug and require bigger and bigger doses.

I love her for what she has dared to be, for her hardness, her cruelty, her egoism, her perverseness, her demoniac destructiveness. She would crush me to ashes without hesitation. She is a personality created to the limit. I worship her courage to hurt, and I am willing to be sacrificed to it. She will add the sum of me to her.

…don’t be calm and contented, don’t let yourself be put to sleep! While you are young, strong, confident, be not weary in well-doing! There is no happiness, and there ought not to be; but if there is a meaning and an object in life, that meaning and object is not our happiness, but something greater and more rational. Do good!

Things that have once been in contact will continue to act on each other at a distance.

It is terrible to destroy a person’s picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.

That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you’ve understood all your life, but in a new way.

Think wrongly, if you please, but in all cases think for yourself.

What is so painful about that time is that nothing was disastrous. It was all wrong, ugly, unhappy and coloured with cynicism, but nothing was tragic, there were no moments that could change anything or anybody. From time to time the emotional lightning flashed and showed a landscape of private misery, and then — we went on dancing.

It seems to me like this. It’s not a terrible thing — I mean, it may be terrible, but it’s not damaging, it’s not poisoning, to do without something one really wants. It’s not bad to say: My work is not what I really want, I’m capable of doing something bigger. Or I’m a person who needs love, and I’m doing without it. What’s terrible is to pretend that the second-rate is the first-rate. To pretend that you don’t need love when you do; or you like your work when you know quite well you’re capable of better.

It isn’t only the terror everywhere, and the fear of being conscious of it, that freezes people. It’s more than that. People know they are in a society dead or dying. They are refusing emotion because at the end of very emotion are property, money, power. They work and despise their work, and so freeze themselves. They love but know that it’s a half- love or a twisted love, and so they freeze themselves.

I knew, and it was an illumination — one of those things one has always known, but never understood before — that all sanity depends on this: that it should be a delight to feel the roughness of a carpet under smooth soles, a delight to feel heat strike the skin, a delight to stand upright, knowing the bones are moving easily under flesh. If this goes, then the conviction of life goes too. But I could feel none of this. … I knew I was moving into a new dimension, further from sanity than I had ever been.

Anna grimaced, acknowledging failure. She could not learn languages, and was too self conscious to ever become somebody else.

But now, sitting with Molly talking, as they had so many hundreds of times before, Anna as saying to herself: Why do I always have this awful need to make other people see things as I do? It’s childish, why should they? What it amounts to is that I am scared of being alone in what I feel.

Anna thought, I wish I hadn’t been so conscious of everything, every little nuance. Once I wouldn’t have noticed: now every conversation, every encounter with a person seems like crossing a mind field: and why can’t I accept that one’s closest friends at moments stick a knife in, deep, between the ribs.

“You mean you’ve never felt that awful moral exhaustion, what the hell does it matter?”

“Nothing. You’re making too much of it. I sat drinking coffee and looking at that stupid face of his and I was thinking, If I was a man I’d go to bed, quite likely simply because I thought he was stupid—if he were a woman, I mean. And I was so bored, so bored, so bored. Then he felt my boredom and decided to reclaim me. So he stood up and said: Oh well I suppose I better be getting home to 16 Plane Avenue or whatever it is. Expecting me to say, Oh no, I can’t bear you to lave. You know, the poor married man, bound to wife and kiddies. They all do it. Please be sorry for me, I have to get home to 16 Plane Avenue and the dreary labour saving house in the suburbs. He said it once. He said it three times—just as if he didn’t live there, weren’t married to her, as if it had nothing to do with him. The little house on 16 Plane Avenue and the missus”

So then I wanted—you know that moment, when they have to pay one back? He said “Anna, you should take more care of yourself, you’re looking ten years older than you should, you are getting positively wizened.” So I said “But Richard, if I’d said to you, Oh yes, do come into bed, at this very moment you’d be saying how beautiful I was. Surely the truth is somewhere in between?”

“I can’t face it. But I suppose I shall. Why is it, it’s on in this country everybody one knows seems to put a good face on things, everyone is bravely carrying a burden.”

“Well, surely the thought that follows—what stereotype am I? What anonymous whole am I part of?”

It seems such a long time ago that I can’t feel myself doing any of these things. I can’t “remember” what it was like to be Mr. Campbell’s secretary or to dance every night, etc. It happened to someone else. I can see myself though, but even that wasn’t true until I found an old photograph the other day which showed a small, thin, brittle black-and-white girl, almost doll-like.

So what I am saying is, in fact, that the human personality, that unique flame, is so sacred to me, that everything else becomes unimportant? Is that what I am saying? Amnd if so, what does it mean?

Men are far more unconscious than women about using their sex in their way; far less honest.

I remember envying her. I remember loving George just for that moment with a sharp painful love, while I called myself all kinds of a fool. For I had turned him down often enough. At that time in my life, for reasons I didn’t understand until later, I didn’t let myself be chosen by men who really wanted me.

He was annoyed because I laughed, and said that a woman in position needed extra dignity of behaviour. “What position?”—I was suddenly very angry, because of the trapped feeling women get at such moments. ‘Yes Anna, but things are different for men and for women. They always have been and they very likely always will be.’ “Always have been?”—inviting him to remember his history. ‘For as long as it matters.’ “Matters to you—not to me.” But we had this quarrel before; we knew all the phrases either was likely to use—the weakness of women, the property sense of men, women in antiquity, etc., etc., etc., ad nauseam. We knew it was a clash of temperament so profound that no words could make any difference to either of us—the truth was that we shocked each other in the deepest feelings and instincts all the time.

Ted had already begun to suffer because of Stanley, the “butterfly under a stone,” who refused to see him as in need of rescue. To console himself he sat by Maryrose and put his arm around her. Maryrose smiled good-humouredly, and remained in the circle of his arm, but as if she detached herself from him and every other man. Very many as it were professionally pretty girls have this gift of allowing themselves to be touched, kissed, held, as if this were a fee they have to pay to Providence for being born beautiful. There is a tolerant smile which goes with a submission to the hands of men, like a yawn or a patient sigh. But there was more to it in Maryrose’s case.

And thinking about this, which I have done so much, I discover that I come around, by a back door, to another of the things that obsess me. I mean, of course, this is a question of “personality.” Heaven knows we are never allowed to forget that the “personality” doesn’t exist anymore. It’s a theme of half the novels written, the theme of the sociologists and all the other -ologists. We’re told so often that human personality had disintegrated into nothing under pressure of all our knowledge that I’ve been believing it. Yet when I look back to that group under the trees, and re-create them in my memory, suddenly I know it’s nonsense. Suppose I were to meet Maryrose now, all these years later, she’d make some gesture, or turn her eyes in such a way, and there she’d be, Maryrose, and indestructible. Or suppose she “broke down,” or became mad. She would break down into her components, and the gesture, the movement of the eyes would remain, even though some connection had gone. And so all this talk, this anti-humanist bullying, about the evaporation of the personality becomes meaningless for me at the point when I manufacture enough emotional energy inside myself to create a memory some human being I’ve known.

But it was Paul who, alone among us, had “amused eyes” and we went into the big room hand in and, I was looking at him and wondering if it were possible that such a self possessed youth could conceivably be as unhappy and tormented as I was; and if it were true that I had, like him, “amused eyes”–what on earth could that mean? I fell all of the sudden into acute irritable depression, as in those days I did very often, and from one second to the next, and I left Paul and went by myself into the bay window.

He was a man who really, very much, needed women. I say this because there aren’t many men left who do. I mean civilized men, the affectionate nonsexual men of our civilization. George needed as woman to submit to him, he needed a woman to be under his spell physically. And men can no longer dominate women in this way without feeling guilty about it. Or very few of them. When George looked at a woman he was imagining her as she would be when he had fucking her into insensibility. And he was afraid I would show in his eyes. I did not understand this then, I did not understand why I got confused when he looked at me. But I’ve met few men like him since, all the same clumsy impatient humility, and with the same hidden arrogant power.

Being so young, twenty-three or four, I suffered, like so many “emancipated” girls, from a terror of being trapped and tamed by domesticity.

And yet–this man, George, the trapped one, the man who had put that unfortunate women, his wife, in a cage, also represented for me, and I knew it, a powerful sexuality from which I fled inwardly, but then inevitably turned towards. I knew by instinct that if I went to bed with George I’d learn a sexuality that I hadn’t come anywhere near yet.

It was all wrong, ugly, unhappy and coloured with cynicism, but nothing was tragic, there were no moments that could change anything or anybody.

But that is just the lazy memory, because as soon as I start to think about the last weekends, I realize that there must have been incidents during the intervening weekends that led up to it. But I can’t remember, it’s all gone. And I get exasperated, trying to remember–it’s like wrestling with an obstinate other-self who insists on it’s own kind of privacy. Yet it’s all there in my brain if only I could get at it. I am appalled at how much I didn’t notice, living inside the subjective highly-colored mist. How do I know that what I “remember” was what was important?

Our relationship had remained the same, tender and half-mocking and full of promise.

And the “Anna” of that time is like an enemy, or like an old friend one has known too well and doesn’t want to see.

This both pleased me–being back in the fold, so to speak, already entitled to the elaborate ironies and complicities of the initiated; and made me suddenly exhausted.

Twice tried to break the thing, start on a different level, failed–the atmosphere prickling with hostility.

I couldn’t bear to hear him, being spiteful, or myself, being stupid. So I made an excuse and left him.

“My dear Anna, the human soul, sitting in a kitchen, or for that matter, in a double bed, is quite complicated enough, we don’t understand the first thing about it. Yet you’re sitting there worrying because you can’t make sense of the human soul in the middle of the world revolutionary.”

A born talker, never stops talking, but the most interesting kind of talker there is, she never knows what she is going to say until it is out of her mouth, so that she continually blushing, catching herself up short, explaining just what it is that she meant, or laughing nervously. Or she stops with a puzzled frown in the middle of a setence, as if to say: “Sure I don’t think that?”

You’ll get over it…” It’s the clichés that cause the trouble. To lose someone you love is to alter your life for ever. You don’t get over it because ‘it” is the person you loved. The pain stops, there are new people, but the gap never loses. How could it? The particularness of someone who mattered enough to grieve over is not made anodyne by death. This hole in my heart is in the shape of you and no-one else can fit it. Why would I want them to?

Every time I hear a political speech or I read those of our leaders, I am horrified at having, for years, heard nothing which sounded human. It is always the same words telling the same lies. And the fact that men accept this, that the people’s anger has not destroyed these hollow clowns, strikes me as proof that men attribute no importance to the way they are governed; that they gamble – yes, gamble – with a whole part of their life and their so called ‘vital interests.’

The evil that is in the world almost always comes from ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding.

After another moment’s silence she mumbled that I was peculiar, that that was probably why she loved me but that one day I might disgust her for the very same reason.

I know that man is capable of great deeds. But if he isn’t capable of great emotion, well, he leaves me cold.

If absolute truth belongs to anyone in this world, it certainly does not belong to the man or party that claims to possess it.

Love, they say, enslaves and passion is a demon and many have been lost for love. I know this is true, but I know too that without love we grope the tunnels of our lives and never see the sun. When I fell in love it was as though I looked into a mirror for the first time and saw myself. I lifted my hand in bewilderment and felt my cheeks, my neck. This was me. And when I had looked at myself and grown accustomed to who I was, I was not afraid to hate parts of me because I wanted to be worthy of the mirror bearer.

I didn’t know what hate felt like, not the hate that comes after love. It’s huge and desperate and it longs to be proved wrong. And every day it’s proved right it grows a little more monstrous. If the love was passion, the hate will be obsession. A need to see the once-loved weak and cowed beneath pity. Disgust is close and dignity is far away. The hate is not only for the once loved, it’s for yourself too; how could you ever have loved this?

“How is it that one day life is orderly and you are content, a little cynical perhaps but on the whole just so, and then without warning you find the solid floor is a trapdor and you are now in another place whose geography is uncertain and whose customs are strange?

Travellers at least have a chose. Those who set sail know know that things will not be the same as at home. Explorers are perpared. But for us, who travel to cities of the interior by chance, there is no preparaton. We who are fluent find liffe is a foreign language. Somewhere beween the swamp and the mountains. Somewhere beween fear and sex. Somewere beween God and the Devil passion is and the way there is sudden and the way back worse.”

I think now that being free is not being powerful or rich or well regarded or without obligation but being able to love. To love someone else enough to forget about yourself even for one moment is to be free.

Intensity is the desire to receive. Open yourself to light and you will become light.

The unknownness of my needs frightens me. I do now know how huge they are, or how high they are, I only know that they are not being met.

Knowing too much about other people puts you in their power, they have a claim on you, you are forced to understand their reasons for doing things and then you are weakened.

To be rendered unconscious; to lie exposed, without shame, at the mercy of others; to be touched, incised, plundered, remade – this is what they are thinking of when they look at him, with their widening eyes and slightly parted lips.

To take that risk, to offer life and remain alive, open yourself like this and become whole.

All observations of life are harsh, because life is. I lament that fact, but I cannot change it.

Every habit he’s ever had is still there in his body, lying dormant like flowers in the desert. Given the right conditions, all his old addictions would burst into full and luxuriant bloom.

I wonder which is preferable, to walk around all your life swollen up with your own secrets until you burst from the pressure of them, or to have them sucked out of you, every paragraph, every sentence, every word of them, so at the end you’re depleted of all that was once as precious to you as hoarded gold, as close to you as your skin – everything that was of the deepest importance to you, everything that made you cringe and wish to conceal, everything that belonged to you alone – and must spend the rest of your days like an empty sack flapping in the wind, an empty sack branded with a bright fluorescent label so that everyone will know what sort of secrets used to be inside you?

…he doesn’t know it, but this touching she does is not only compassionate, but possessive.

You refuse to own yourself, you permit others to do it for you

Hatred would have been easier. With hatred, I would have known what to do. Hatred is clear, metallic, one-handed, unwavering; unlike love.

What is it that I’ll want from you? Not love: that would be too much to ask. Not forgiveness, which isn’t yours to bestow. Only a listener, perhaps; only someone who will see me. Don’t prettify me though, whatever else you do: I have no wish to be a decorated skull.

Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It’s like the tide going out, revealing whatever’s been thrown away and sunk: broken bottles, old gloves, rusting pop cans, nibbled fishbodies, bones. This is the kind of thing you see if you sit in the darkness with open eyes, not knowing the future. The ruin you’ve made.

Old lovers go the way of old photographs, bleaching out gradually as in a slow bath of acid: first the moles and pimples, then the shadings. Then the faces themselves, until nothing remains but the general outlines.

Was that the beginning, that evening? It’s hard to know. Beginnings are sudden, but also insidious. They creep up on you sideways, they keep to the shadows, they lurk unrecognized. Then, later, they spring.

I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary.

Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.

“Falling in love, we said; I fell for him. We were falling women. We believed in it, this downward motion: so lovely, like flying, and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely. God is love, they once said, but we reversed that, and love, like heaven, was always just around the corner. The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word, made flesh.

And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends had been evasive about it, at the time.

There is a good deal of comfort, now, in remembering this.”

If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next — if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions — you’d be doomed. You’d be ruined as God. You’d be a stone. You’d never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning.  You’d never dare to.

Gone mad is what they say, and sometimes, run mad, as if mad is a different direction, like west; as if mad is a different house you could step into, or a separate country entirely. But when you go mad you don’t go any other place, you stay where you are. And somebody else comes in.

It was a long time ago. It feels like another life until I remember it was my life, like a letter you turn up in your own handwriting, hardly believing what it says.

But I lacked practice. For more than thirty years I had been in love exclusively with myself. What hope was there of losing such a habit? I didn’t lose it and remained a trifler in passion.

The body shuts down when it has too much to bear; goes its own way quietly inside, waiting for a better time, leaving you numb and half alive.

For my part, I think we need more emotion, not less. But I think, too, that we need to educate people in how to feel. Emotionalism is not the same as emotion. We cannot cut out emotion – in the economy of the human body, it is the limbic, not the neural, highway that takes precedence. We are not robots…but we act as though all our problems would be solved if only we had no emotions to cloud our judgment.

I struggled in my mind with all kinds of defenses. Should I be hurt? Surprised? Should I laugh it off? I wanted to say something cruel to expiate my anger and to justify myself. But it’s difficult with old friends; difficult because it’s so easy. You know one another as well as lovers do and you have had less to pretend about. I poured myself a drink and shrugged. ‘Nothing’s perfect.’

You can’t create experience, you undergo it.

When the soul suffers too much, it develops a taste for misfortune.

We all carry within us places of exile, our crimes, our ravages. Our task is not to unleash them on the world; it is to transform them in ourselves and others.

She was breathing deeply, she forgot the cold, the weight of beings, the insane or static life, the long anguish of living or dying. After so many years running from fear, fleeing crazily, uselessly, she was finally coming to a halt. At the same time she seemed to be recovering her roots, and the sap rose anew in her body, which was no longer trembling. Pressing her whole belly against the parapet, leaning toward the wheeling sky, she was only waiting for her pounding heart to settle down, and for the silence to form in her. The last constellations of stars fell in bunches a little lower on the horizon of the desert, and stood motionless. Then, with an unbearable sweetness, the waters of the night began to fill her, submerging the cold, rising gradually to the center of her being, and overflowing wave upon wave to her moaning mouth. A moment later, the whole sky stretched out above her as she lay with her back against the cold earth.

I choose this story above all others because it’s a story I’m struggling to end.

When I look at my life I realize that the mistakes I have made, the things I really regret, were not errors of judgment but failures of feeling.

My heart returns to me what I turn away. I am my own master but not always master of myself.

My first vision of earth was water veiled. I am of the race of men and women who see all things through this curtain of sea and my eyes are the color of water. I looked with chameleon eyes upon the changing face of the world, looked with anonymous vision upon my uncompleted self. I remember my first birth in water.

No man is great enough or wise enough for any of us to surrender our destiny to. The only way in which anyone can lead us is to restore to us the belief in our own guidance.

The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.

What an astounding thing is the voice! By what miracle is the hot magma of the earth transformed into that which we call speech? If out of clay such an abstract medium as words can be shaped what is to hinder us from leaving our bodies at will and taking up our abode on other planets or between the planets? What is to prevent us from rearranging all life, atomic, molecular, corporeal, stellar, diving? Who or what is powerful enough to eradicate this miraculous leaven which we bear within us like a seed and which, after we have embraced in our mind all the universe, is nothing more than a seed — since to say universe is as easy as to say seed, and we have yet to say greater things, things beyond saying, things limitless and inconceivable, things which no trick of language can encompass.

In the world of the dreamer there was solitude: all the exaltations and joys came in the moment of preparation for living. They took place in solitude. But with action came anxiety, and the sense of insuperable effort made to match the dream, and with it came weariness, discouragement, and the flight into solitude again. And then in solitude, in the opium den of remembrance, the possibility of pleasure again.

This image of herself as a not ordinary women, an image which was trembling now in his eyes, might suddenly disappear. Nothing more difficult to live up to than men’s dreams.

Human beings can reach such desperate solitude that they may cross a boundary beyond which words cannot serve, and at such moments there is nothing left for them but to bark.

Electric flesh-arrows traversing the body. A rainbow of color strikes the eyelids. A foam of music falls over the ears. It is the gong of the orgasm.

For you and for me the highest moment, the keenest joy, is not when our minds dominate but when we lose our minds…

To withhold from living is to die … the more you give of yourself to life the more life nourishes you.

All those who try to unveil the mysteries always have tragic lives. At the end they are always punished.

I think that natural truths will cease to be spat at us like insults, that aesthetics will once more be linked with ethics, and that people will become aware that in casting out aesthetics that they also cast out a respect for human life, a respect for creation, a respect for spiritual values. Aesthetics was an expression of man’s need to be in love with his world. The cult of ugliness is a regression. It destroys our appetite, our love for our world.

I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood. That the speaking profits me, beyond any other effect.

Let’s not beat around the bush; I love life — that’s my real weakness. I love it so much that I am incapable of imagining what is not life.

“Love, the strongest and deepest element in all life, the harbinger of hope, of joy, of ecstasy; love, the defier of all laws, of all conventions; love, the freest, the most powerful moulder of human destiny; how can such an all-compelling force be synonymous with that poor little State and Church-begotten weed, marriage?
Free love? As if love is anything but free! Man has bought brains, but all the millions in the world have failed to buy love. Man has subdued bodies, but all the power on earth has been unable to subdue love. Man has conquered whole nations, but all his armies could not conquer love. Man has chained and fettered the spirit, but he has been utterly helpless before love. High on a throne, with all the splendor and pomp his gold can command, man is yet poor and desolate, if love passes him by. And if it stays, the poorest hovel is radiant with warmth, with life and color. Thus love has the magic power to make of a beggar a king. Yes, love is free; it can dwell in no other atmosphere.”

Everywhere and always, since its very inception, Christianity has turned the earth into a vale of tears; always it has made of life a weak, diseased thing, always it has instilled fear in man, turning him into a dual being, whose life energies are spent in the struggle between body and soul. In decrying the body as something evil, the flesh as the tempter to everything that is sinful, man has mutilated his being in the vain attempt to keep his soul pure, while his body rotted away from the injuries and tortures inflicted upon it.

I have always wanted to be both man and woman, to incorporate the strongest and richest parts of my mother and father within/into me — to share valleys and mountains upon my body the way the earth does in hills and peaks.

Freedom is fragile and must be protected. To sacrifice it, even as a temporary measure, is to betray it.

The fear of freedom is strong in us. We call it chaos or anarchy, and the words are threatening. We live in a true chaos of contradicting authorities, an age of conformism without community, of proximity without communication. We could only fear chaos if we imagined that it was unknown to us, but in fact we know it very well. It is unlikely that the techniques of liberation spontaneously adopted by women will be in such fierce conflict as exists between warring self-interests and conflicting dogmas, for they will not seek to eliminate all systems but their own. However diverse they may be, they need not be utterly irreconcilable, because they will not be conquistatorial.

The pain of sexual frustration, of repressed tenderness, of denied curiosity, of isolation in the ego, of greed, suppressed rebellion, of hatred poisoning all love and generosity, permeates our sexuality. What we love we destroy.

For 2.000 years, you’ve had the nerve to tell women who we are. We use your words; we eat your food. Every way we get money has to be a crime. We are plagiarists, liars and criminals.

Why am I compelled to write? Because the writing saves me from this complacency I fear. Because I have no choice. Because I must keep the spirit of my revolt and myself alive. Because the world I create in the writing compensates for what the real world does not give me. By writing I put order in the world, give it a handle so I can grasp it.

At some point, on our way to a new consciousness, we will have to leave the opposite bank, the split between the two mortal combatants somehow healed so that we are on both shores at once and, at once, see through serpent and eagle eyes. Or perhaps we will decide to disengage from the dominant culture, write it off all together as a lost cause, and cross the border into a wholly new and separate territory. Or we might go another route. The possibilities are numerous once we decide to act and not react.

Sometimes I wonder if MacKinnon has simply been driven mad by all the sick things people do to one another. I, too, recoil in pain and incomprehension whenever I hear about the latest psychopath who has shot his mother, machine-gunned his coworkers, raped his daughter, or slashed a prostitute. I notice that such men are more likely to have read the bible than pornography, but I do not hold either script responsible for their actions.

Here, then, are my answers: I do not believe in God, because I believe in man. Whatever his mistakes, man has for thousands of years past been working to undo the botched job your God has made.

Crime is naught but misdirected energy. So long as every institution of today, economic, political, social, and moral, conspires to misdirect human energy into wrong channels; so long as most people are out of place doing the things they hate to do, living a life they loathe to live, crime will be inevitable, and all the laws on the statutes can only increase, but never do away with, crime.

The human face is the organic seat of beauty…. It is the register of value in development, a record of Experience, whose legitimate office is to perfect the life, a legible language to those who will study it, of the majestic mistress, the soul.

I want to see this men’s movement make a commitment to ending rape because that is the only meaningful commitment to equality. It is astonishing that in all our worlds of feminism and antisexism we never talk seriously about ending rape. Ending it. Stopping it. No more. No more rape. In the back of our minds, are we holding on to its inevitability as the last preserve of the biological? Do we think that it is always going to exist no matter what we do? All of our political actions are lies if we don’t make a commitment to ending the practice of rape. This commitment has to be political. It has to be serious. It has to be systematic. It has to be public. It can’t be self-indulgent.

My thought is me: that’s why I can’t stop. I exist because I think … and I can’t prevent myself from thinking.

Monsieur … I do not believe in God; his existence has been disproved by Science. But in the concentration camp, I learned to believe in men.

For the moment, the jazz is playing; there is no melody, just notes, a myriad tiny tremors. The notes know no rest, an inflexible order gives birth to them then destroys them, without ever leaving them the chance to recuperate and exist for themselves…. I would like to hold them back, but I know that, if I succeeded in stopping one, there would only remain in may hand a corrupt and languishing sound. I must accept their death; I must even want that death: I know of few more bitter or intense impressions.

I know. I know that I shall never again meet anything or anybody who will inspire me with passion. You know, it’s quite a job starting to love somebody. You have to have energy, generosity, blindness. There is even a moment, in the very beginning, when you have to jump across a precipice: if you think about it you don’t do it. I know I’ll never jump again.

So that is what hell is. I would never have believed it. You remember: the fire and brimstone, the torture. Ah! the farce. There is no need for torture: hell is other people.

Teach me how to talk to you. WANT. Is my wanting you so bad, wanting your cock so bad, wanting the feel of your lips on my lips just me being selfish and egoistic? Teach me a new language.

One always dies too soon—or too late. And yet, life is there, finished: the line is drawn, and it must all be added up. You are nothing other than your life.

There is more than one kind of freedom… Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don’t underrate it.

My friends, who are both women, tell me their stories, which cannot be believed and which are true. They are horror stories and they have not happened to me, they have not yet happened to me, they have happened to me but we are detached, we watch our unbelief with horror.

The fact is there are no stories I can tell my friends that will make them feel better. History cannot be erased, although we can soothe ourselves by speculating about it.

It must be said at the outset that the field of mental illness has always been debatable ground. Who is sane, who isn’t, and who is qualified to judge? Standards have fluctuated wildly, and abuses have been numerous. In the last century, in the United States, a wife could be committed to an asylum on the say-so of her husband and two easily-paid-off doctors alone, and there are cases on record of wives who were “put away” for holding theological opinions that differed from those of the husband, or for refusing to have as much sex as he would like.

“I don’t know why, but something inside me snapped. I started yelling at the top of my lungs, and I insulted him and told him not to waste his prayers on me. I grabbed him by the collar of his cassock. I was pouring out on him everything that was in my heart, cries of anger and cries of joy.

He seemed so certain about everything, didn’t he? And yet none of his certainties was worth one hair of a woman’s head. He wasn’t even sure he was alive, because he was living like a dead man. Whereas it looked as if I was the one who’d come up emptyhanded. But I was sure about me, about everything, surer than he could ever be, sure of my life and sure of the death I had waiting for me. Yes, that was all I had. But at least I had as much of a hold on it as it had on me. I had been right, I was still right, I was always right. I had lived my life one way and I could just as well have lived it another. I had done this and I hadn’t done that. I hadn’t done this thing but I had done another. And so? It was as if I had waited all this time for this moment and for the first light of this dawn to be vindicated. Nothing, nothing mattered, and I knew why. So did he. Throughout the whole absurd life I’d lived, a dark wind had been rising toward me from somewhere deep in my future, across years that were still to come, and as it passed, this wind leveled whatever was offered to me at the time, in years no more real than the ones I was living. What did other people’s deaths or a mother’s love matter to me; what did his God or the lives people choose or the fate they think they elect matter to me when we’re all elected by the same fate, me and billions of privileged people like him who also called themselves my brothers? Couldn’t he see, couldn’t he see that? Everybody was privileged. There were only privileged people. The others would all be condemned one day. And he would be condemned, too.”

The tragedy of sexual intercourse is the perpetual virginity of the soul.

I disregard the proportions, the measures, the tempo of the ordinary world. I refuse to live in the ordinary world as ordinary women. To enter ordinary relationships. I want ecstasy. I am a neurotic — in the sense that I live in my world. I will not adjust myself to the world. I am adjusted to myself.

Why is it I find out so slowly what women are made for? It comes nudging and urging up in me like tulip bulbs in April.

No pleasure philosophy, no sensuality, no place nor power, no material success can for a moment give such inner satisfaction as the sense of living for good purposes, for maintenance of integrity, for the preservation of self-approval.

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.

Love is the ultimate outlaw. It just won’t adhere to any rules. The most any of us can do is to sign on as its accomplice. Instead of vowing to honor and obey, maybe we should swear to aid and abet. That would mean that security is out of the question. The words “make” and “stay” become inappropriate. My love for you has no strings attached. I love you for free.

…I want something else. I’m not even sure what to call it anymore except I know it feels roomy and it’s drenched in sunlight and it’s weightless and I know it’s not cheap. Probably not even real.

And perhaps, it comforts you that your body now reflects the damage you feel…

I, too, felt ready to start life all over again. It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe. To feel it so like myself, indeed, so brotherly, made me realize that I’d been happy, and that I was happy still. For all to be accomplished, for me to feel less lonely, all that remained to hope was that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration.

“But then I realized, they didn’t mean their own mothers. Not those weak women, those victims. Drug addicts, shopaholics, cookie bakers. They didn’t mean the women who let them down, who failed to help them into womanhood, women who let their boyfriends run a train on them. Bingers and purgers, women smiling into mirrors, women in girdles, women on barstools. Not those women with their complaints and their magazines, controlling women, women who asked, what’s in it for me? Not the women watching TV while they made dinner, women who dyed their hair blonde behind closed doors trying to look twenty-three. They didn’t mean the mothers washing dishes wishing they’d never married, the ones in the ER, saying they fell down the stairs, not the ones in prison saying loneliness is the human condition, get used to it.

They wanted the real mother, the blood mother, the great womb, mother of a fierce compassion, a woman large enough to hold all the pain, to carry it away. What we needed was someone who bled, someone deep and rich as a field, a wide-hipped mother, awesome, immense women like huge soft couches, mothers coursing with blood, mothers big enough, wide enough, for us to hide in, to sink down to the bottom of, mothers who would breathe for us when we could not breathe anymore, who would fight for us, who would kill for us, die for us.”

Family is family, but even love can’t keep people from eating at each other.

I shall tell you a great secret, my friend. Do not wait for the Last Judgment. It takes place every day.

Manhattan. Sometimes from beyond the skyscrapers, across of thousands of high walls, the cry of a tugboat finds you in your insomnia in the middle of the night, and you remember that this desert of iron and cement is an island.

Life shrinks or expands according to one’s courage.

Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous.

I had only a little time left and I didn’t want to waste it on God.

The truly faithless one is the one who makes love to only a fraction of you. And denies the rest.

I don’t know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I cannot know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it. What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms. What I touch, what resists me — that I understand. And these two certainties — my appetite for the absolute and for unity and the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle — I also know that I cannot reconcile them. What other truth can I admit without lying, without bringing in a hope I lack and which means nothing within the limits of my conditions?

I see myself wrapped in lies, which do not seem to penetrate my soul, as if they are not really a part of me. They are like costumes.

You are so terribly nimble, so clever. I distrust your cleverness. You make a wonderful pattern, everything is in its place, it looks convincingly clear, too clear. And meanwhile, where are you? Not on the clear surface of your ideas, but you have already sunk deeper, into darker regions, so that one only thinks one has been given all your thoughts, one only imagines you have emptied yourself in that clarity. But there are layers and layers — you’re bottomless, unfathomable. Your clearness is deceptive. You are the thinker who arouses most confusion in me, most doubt, most disturbance.

You cannot save people, you can only love them.

All those who try to unveil the mysteries always have tragic lives. At the end they are always punished.

If I try to seize this self of which I feel sure, if I try to define and to summarize it, it is nothing but water slipping through my fingers. I can sketch one by one all the aspects it is able to assume, all those likewise that have been attributed to it, this upbringing, this origin, this ardor or these silences, this nobility or this vileness. But aspects cannot be added up.

Query: How to contrive not to waste one’s time? Answer: By being fully aware of it all the while. Ways in which this can be done: By spending one’s days on an uneasy chair in a dentist’s waiting room; by remaining on one’s balcony all a Sunday afternoon; by travelling by the longest and least-convenient train routes, and of course standing all the way; by queueing at the box-office of theatres and then not booking a seat.

The enemy of a love is never outside, it’s not a man or woman, it’s what we lack in ourselves.

When she did finally fall asleep it was the restless sleep of the night watchman continuously aware of danger and of the treacheries of time seeking to cheat her by permitting clocks to strike the passing hours when she was not awake to grasp their contents.

No man is an island entire to itself any man’s death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.

Knowing that certain nights whose sweetness lingers will keep returning to the earth and sea after we are gone, yes, this helps us to die.

I was assailed by memories of a life that wasn’t mine anymore, but one in which I’d found the simplest and most lasting joys.

If only we could all escape from this house of incest, where we only love ourselves in the other, if only I could save you all from yourselves.

I think we seduce ourselves with hope. We seduce ourselves with “tomorrow will be better, so of course I won’t fight today; I’ll wait until tomorrow”. And when tomorrow comes and it is, of course, worse, I say “maybe next week”. Hope in that sense has always been a tool of the oppressors.

Life is so fluid that one can only hope to capture the living moment, to capture it alive and fresh … without destroying that moment.

Anxiety is love’s greatest killer. It makes one feel as you might when a drowning man holds unto you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.

Living never wore one out so much as the effort not to live.

Shame is the lie someone told you about yourself.

Passion gives me moments of wholeness.

When others asked the truth of me, I was convinced it was not the truth they wanted, but an illusion they could bear to live with.

I have so strong a sense of creation, of tomorrow, that I cannot get drunk, knowing I will be less alive, less well, less creative the next day.

I seek the real stuff of life. Profound drama.

Experience teaches acceptance of the imperfect as life.

There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.

I feel a fatigue of the tongue seeking to utter impossible things until it twists itself into a knot and chokes me. I feel a fatigue at this mass of nerves seeking to uphold a world that is falling apart. I feel a fatigue at feeling, at the fervor of my dreams, the fever of my thought, the intensity of my hallucinations. A fatigue at the sufferings of others and my own. I feel my own blood thundering inside of me, I feel the horror of falling into abysms. But you and I would always fall together and I would not be afraid. We would fall into abysms, but you would carry your phosphorescences to the very bottom of the abysms. We could fall together and ascend together, far into space. I was always exhausted by my dreams, not because of the dreams, but because of the fear of not being able to return. I do not need to return. I will find you everywhere. You alone can go wherever I go, into the same mysterious regions. You too know the language of the nerves. You will always know what I am saying even if I do not.

I love your silences, they are like mine. You are the only being before whom I am not distressed by my own silences. You have a vehement silence, one feels it is charged with essences, it is a strangely alive silence, like a trap open over a well, from which one can hear the secret murmur of the earth itself.

You are like a person who consumes herself in love and giving and does not know the miracles that are born of this.

For me, the adventures of the mind, each inflection of thought, each movement, nuance, growth, discovery, is a source of exhilaration.

“The bottom line is that (a) people are never perfect, but love can be, (b) that is the one and only way that the mediocre and vile can be transformed, and (c) doing that makes it that. We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love.”

Have you even been in a state of pain so intense, it was like a living creature wound tight against your ribcage and shoulders and neck? Getting into that place requires not just one thing that’s wrong, but instead a whole tangled knot of wrongness. It requires wrong things you’ve done, along with wrong things that have been done to you. It requires both good and bad intentions, doubled and triples back upon themselves until they’re so disoriented, you can’t see clearly where they began. It requires wrong decisions, nut no vision of what other choices you might have made. It requires you to see every inadequacy, every failing, every weakness you possess, magnified to a horrific size. It requires bad luck. And then, when you reach this place and look around, you can only see blackness. And only on possible route to travel: downward and inward, into more blackness.

If we are bruised at all, it is by the images we carry, the memories we wish we didn’t have. I would always have them, dark pictures in a mental album that I could never throw away.

If all of us acted in unison as I act individually there would be no wars and no poverty. I have made myself personally responsible for the fate of every human being who has come my way.

I don’t want to eke out my life like a resource in short supply. The only selfish life is a timid one. To hold back, to withdraw, to keep the best in reserve both overvalues the self and undervalues what the self is. Here’s my life – I have to mine it, farm it, trade it, tenant it and when the lease is up it cannot be renewed. Here’s my chance. I’ll take it.

My suffering does matter. I can’t help but mix my life with that of the universe. Life is a peephole, a single, tiny entry onto a vastness – how can I not dwell on this brief, cramped view I have of things? This peephole is all I’ve got.

What a strange world it is where you can have as much sex as you like but love is taboo. I’m talking about the real thing, the grand passion, which may not allow affection or convenience or happiness. The truth is that love smashes into your life like an ice floe, and even if your heart is built like the Titanic you go down. That’s the size of it, the immensity of it. It’s not proper, it’s not clean, it’s not containable.

It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone´s fault. If it was Us, what did that make Me? After all, I´m one of Us. I must be. I´ve certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No-one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We´re always one of Us. It´s Them that do the bad things.

Self-respect cannot be hunted. It cannot be purchased. It is never for sale. It comes to us when we are alone, in quiet moments, in quiet places, when we suddenly realize that, knowing the good, we have done it, knowing the beautiful, we have served it; knowing the truth, we have spoken it.

I never believed in the ‘two people as one’ theory of marriage. I believe in two separate people committed to the faults and weaknesses of the other, bonded by trust and tolerance, forged with the respect of the other person’s life and space. That’s a harder thing to accomplish, and in my mind a much more precious one.

What was left for us then, we orgasmic corpses? The harsh breath of fucking was to be transformed into the deep healing breath of communion. Our old comrades from the days and nights of the torrid upheaval of the sexual revolution are now companions in this long passage where we heal and find new meaning in our longing. While I do not always have the courage to say this, all the anguish of these nightmarish times is worth this single truth at last discovered. There has been no journey, for in your arms and eyes, in your mind and thighs, in the warm surrender of our sweet selves melting in a communion such as I’d only dreamed possible, I realized that with you I have always been home, for in you is the love I have thirsted for so long.

I know not how I may seem to others, but to myself I am but a small child wandering upon the vast shores of knowledge, every now and then finding a small bright pebble to content myself with.

I am nowhere near ready to die. I’ve died enough. I still have some living to do. I’ve just got to start doing it a little more carefully.

you see these same beauty contest winners years later, grown old, in supermarkets; they are fussy, insane, bitter, demeaned – they put their stock in something unlasting, they were tricked; beware the sharp knives of their shopping carts – they are the madwomen of the Universe.

In my heart, I think a woman has two choices: either she’s a feminist or a masochist.

It’s so easy to love somebody, I tell you, where there’s nothing else around.

The struggle to see and the struggle to love the flawed thing we see – what other struggle is there?

… as if the truth were a secret in such low solution that only immensity can give us a sensible taste.

In short, I deduce that all, not only great men, but even those who are even a tiny bit off the beaten track – that is, who are a tiny bit capable of saying something new – by their very nature cannot fail to be criminals – more or less, to be sure.

When you want to understand something, you stand in front of it all by yourself, without any help; all the past history of your world is of no use to you. And then it disappears and what you have understood
disappears with it.

But the more I read… after awhile… I begin to find they were all writing about the same thing, this same dull old here-today-gone-tomorrow scene… Shakespeare, Milton, Matthew Arnold, even Baudelaire, even this cat whoever he was that wrote Beowulf… the same scene for the same reasons and to the same end, whether it was Dante with his pit or Baudelaire with his pot… the same dull old scene…

Very few people are capable of being independent; it is a privelege of the strong. And whoever tries it, however justified, without having to, proves that he is probably not only strong but bold to the point of complete recklessness. For he walks into a labyrinth; he increases a thousandfold the dangers which are inherent in life anyway. And not the smallest of his dangers is that no one can witness how or where he loses his way, falls into solitude, or is torn to pieces by some troglodytic minotaur of conscience. When such a man perishes, it happens so far from human understanding that other men have no feeling for it, no fellow feeling.

There are two ways to slide easily through life: to believe everything or to doubt everything; both ways save us from thinking.

Every man is eternally alone. But when you get mixed up with a fairly decent crowd, you forget that appalling fact for long enough to give your brain time to recover from the acute symptoms of its disease – that of thinking.

Time is always running out … Life’s much too uncertain to leave important things unsaid.

It’s a stark thought that when we die most of us will leave behind uneaten biscuits, unused coffee, half toilet rolls, half cartons of milk in the fridge to go sour; that everyday functional things will outlive us and prove that we weren’t ready to go; that we weren’t smart or knowing or heroic; that we were just animals whose animal bodies stopped working without any sort of schedule or any consent from us.

“That’s the problem with seeing things. Nothing is clear. Feelings, ideas shape what’s in front of you. Cézanne wanted the naked world, but the world is never naked. In my work, I want to create doubt.” He stopped and smiled at me. “Because that’s what we’re sure of.”

“Forgetting,” I said, “is probably as much a part of life as remembering. We’re all amnesiacs.”

I may not always be right, but I care passionately about what is true and I never say anything that I do not believe to be right.

Whenever a taboo is broken, something good happens, something vitalizing.

I believe in saying the truth, coming out with it cold, shocking if necessary, not disguising it.

Something begins in order to end: an adventure doesn’t let itself be extended; it achieves significance only through its death. Towards this death, which may also be my own, I am drawn irrevocably. Each moment appears only to bring on the moments after. To each moment I cling with all my heart: I know that it is unique, irreplaceable – and yet I would not lift a finger to prevent it from being annihilated.

Without knowing the origin of things we cannot appreciate the result of our life’s effort. Our effort must have some meaning. To find the meaning of our effort is to find the original source of our effort. We should not be concerned about the result of our effort before we know its origin. If the origin is not clear and pure, our effort will not be pure, and its result will not satisfy us.

That’s the problem with drinking, I thought, as I poured myself a drink. If something bad happens you drink in an attempt to forget; if something good happens you drink in order to celebrate; and if nothing happens you drink to make something happen.

As yet, I have seen nothing but this emotional and romantic yen for Revolution; I’ve seen no solid leader or no realistic platform to insure AGAINST the betrayal that has always, so far, followed.

I am against revolutions because they always involve a return to status quo. I am against the status quo both before and after revolutions. I don’t want to wear a black shirt or a red shirt. And I don’t want to salute like an automaton either. I prefer to shake hands when I meet someone I like. The fact is, to put it simply, I am positively against all this crap which is carried on first in the name of this thing, then in the name of that. I believe only in what is active, immediate and personal.

But I never heard the words Liberty Justice Equality come from the man’s lips, except in closing, as if these words were a napkin with which to wipe his mouth at the end of a greasy meal.

A victim who can articulate his own reality is no longer a victim; they are a threat.

There’s always a thing you can deny an oppressor, if only your allegiance. Your belief. Your co-oping. Often even with vastly unequal power, you can find or force and opening to fight back. In your time many without power found ways to fight. Till that became a power.

I don’t think it’s about finding happiness, but rather, finding redemption — finding the ability to redeem yourself, to give yourself back to yourself. And that’s not something you find once and then you’re done; you don’t reach some magical point one day where the whole puzzle falls into place. Every day is the process of looking for the missing pieces — every day you find some new way to give yourself back to yourself, every day is a healing process, every day is a happily-ever-after in progress. It never ends — it’s as eternal as we are.

To exist is simply to be there; what exists appears, lets itself be encountered, but you can never deduce it.

The U.S. Marines have a saying, too: Plan early, plan twice. By which they mean, put off planning for an event as long as possible, because if you do it well ahead of time circumstances will probably change and require replanning.

What else can love do? If we’re selling it, we’d better point out that it’s a starting-point for civic virtue. You can’t love someone without imaginative sympathy, without beginning to see the world from another point of view. You can’t be a good lover, a good artist or a good politician without this capacity (you can get away with it, but that’s not what I mean).

While there was still distance to travel, there was still the slim chance of finding answers. While there was still a journey to be made, my crumbly little self could exist in the potential of making it. But what when the road came to an end? What would I be then?

In this world, there are things you can only do alone, and things you can only do with somebody else. It’s important to combine the two in just the right amount.

Man is alone in the universe. There is nobody else. Out there it’s hideously, horrifically empty. Nothing but a barren wilderness of gas and matter. No matter how loudly you cry, nobody will answer you. No matter how far we travel, all we shall meet is ourselves.

THINGS HAD CHANGED, what an arsehole comment, I had changed things. Things don’t change, they’re not like the seasons moving on a diurnal round. People change things. There are victims of change, but not victims of things.

Summer is here again, along with its balance of sunshine and thunderstorms, memories of sadder and happier times. The circle comes around and I’m both dark and light about it. There is a certain joy in seeing how far one has come along this longish road; but there is also sorrow in leaving a point in time — and a way of life — where it fell. I wonder sometimes; are we only stretched thinner as the years and the miles move us further on? Remembering and growing; holding and letting go — how to do this well? This is the journey I’m on now.

Schools train individuals to respond as a mass. Boys and girls are drilled in being bored, frightened, envious, emotionally needy, generally incompetent. A successful mass production economy requires such a clientele…a managed mass of leveled, spiritless, anxious, family-less, friendless, godless, and obedient people who believe the difference between Coke and Pepsi is worth arguing about.

My anger has left me, my sadness returned, and once more the tears flow. Whom can I curse, whom can I judge when we are all alike unfortunate? Suffering’s universal, hands are outstretched to each other, and when they touch… the great solution will come. My heart is aglow, and I stretch out my hand and cry, ‘Come let us join hands! I love you, I love you!’

I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart.

…I thought how easy it is to destroy the past and how difficult to forget it.

Molecular docking is a serious challenge for bio-chemists. There are many ways to fit molecules together but only a few juxtapositions that bring them close enough to bond. On a molecular level success may mean discovering what synthetic structure, what chemical, will form a union with, say, the protein shape on a tumour cell. If you make this high-risk jigsaw work you may have found a cure for carcinoma. But molecules and the human beings they are a part of exist in a universe of possibility. We touch one another, bond and break, drift away on force-fields we don’t understand.

Why is the mind incapable of deciding its own subject matter? Why when we desperately want to think of one thing to we invariably think of another?

The curse which lies upon marriage is that too often the individuals are joined in their weakness rather than in their strength, each asking from the other instead of finding pleasure in giving. It is even more deceptive to dream of gaining through the child a plenitude, a warmth, a value, which one is unable to create for oneself; the child brings joy only to the woman who is capable of disinterestedly desiring the happiness of another, to one who without being wrapped up in self seeks to transcend her own existence.

He was free, free in every way, free to behave like a fool or a machine, free to accept, free to refuse, free to equivocate; to marry, to give up the game, to drag this death weight about with him for years to come. He could do what he liked, no one had the right to advise him, there would be for him no Good or Evil unless he thought them into being.

Man is defined as a human being and a woman as a female – whenever she behaves as a human being she is said to imitate the male.

If you live long enough, you’ll see that every victory turns into a defeat.

I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for the truth; and truth rewarded me.

To emancipate woman is to refuse to confine her to the relations she bears to man, not to deny them to her; let her have her independent existence and she will continue none the less to exist to him also; mutually recognizing each other as subject, each will yet remain for the other an other.

In itself, homosexuality is as limiting as heterosexuality: the ideal should be to be capable of loving a woman or a man; either, a human being, without feeling fear, restraint, or obligation.

Defending the truth is not something one does out of a sense of duty or to allay guilt complexes, but is a reward in itself.

I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom.

Sex pleasure in woman, as I have said, is a kind of magic spell; it demands complete abandon; if words or movements oppose the magic of caresses, the spell is broken.

On ne naît pas femme: on le devient. [ One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.]

I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity. I want this adventure that is the context of my life to go on without end.

Show me a man or a woman alone and I’ll show you a saint. Give me two and they’ll fall in love. Give me three and they’ll invent the charming thing we call ’society’. Give me four and they’ll build a pyramid. Give me five and they’ll make one an outcast. Give me six and they’ll reinvent prejudice. Give me seven and in seven years they’ll reinvent warfare. Man may have been made in the image of God, but human society was made in the image of His opposite number, and is always trying to get back home.

“There are no happy endings, just happy days, happy moments. The only real ending is death, and trust me, no one dies happy. And the price of not dying is that things change all the time, and the only thing you can count on is that there’s not a thing you can do about it.”

“Time is always running out … Life’s much too uncertain to leave important things unsaid.”

I ran out and got the New York World-Telegram. It was a very small item – WOMAN 28 FOUND DEAD.
…
For a long time I stared at the word WOMAN. Had we both grown up, then, become women?

There comes that phase in life when, tired of losing, you decide to stop losing, then continue losing. Then you decide to really stop losing, and continue losing. The losing goes on and on so long you begin to watch with curiosity, wondering how low you can go.

It’s a stark thought that when we die most of us will leave behind uneaten biscuits, unused coffee, half toilet rolls, half cartons of milk in the fridge to go sour; that everyday functional things will outlive us and prove that we weren’t ready to go; that we weren’t smart or knowing or heroic; that we were just animals whose animal bodies stopped working without any sort of schedule or any consent from us.

While there was still distance to travel, there was still the slim chance of finding answers. While there was still a journey to be made, my crumbly little self could exist in the potential of making it. But what when the road came to an end? What would I be then?

The boys climb on top of their desks because they feel the need to show their love and support and affection for Robin and to show above all that the past was worth something, even if the future must now be different.

Knowing that some time one will have to give up everything, whatever that everything is, that’s what’s unbearable, for everyone, it’s all we’ve ever known, all we’ve ever been used to. I can understand someone who regrets dying simply because they won’t be able to read their favourite author’s next book, or see a new film starring an actress they admire, or drink another glass of beer, or do today’s crossword, or continue to follow a particular television series, or because they won’t know who won this year’s FA Cup.

“You know what’s wrong with you, Miss Whoever-you-are? You’re chicken, you’ve got no guts. You’re afraid to stick out your chin and say, “Okay, life’s a fact, people do fall in love, people do belong to each other, because that’s the only chance anybody’s got for real happiness.” You call yourself a free spirit, a “wild thing,” and you’re terrified somebody’s gonna stick you in a cage. Well baby, you’re already in that cage. You built it yourself. And it’s not bounded in the west by Tulip, Texas, or in the east by Somali-land. It’s wherever you go. Because no matter where you run, you just end up running into yourself.”

“Strange is our situation here upon Earth. Each of us comes for a short visit, not knowing why, yet sometimes seeming to divine a purpose. From the standpoint of daily life, there is one thing we do know: that we are here for the sake of others…above all, for those upon whose smile and well-being our own happiness depends, and also for the countless unknown souls with whose fate we are connected by a bond of sympathy. Many times a day we realize how much of our own outer and inner life is built upon the labors of other human beings, and how earnestly we must exert ourselves in order to give in return as much as we have received and are still receiving.”

Love in it’s purest form.  Not television love, with its glare and hollow and sequined glint; not sex and allure all high shoes and high drama, everything both too small and in too much excess, but just love.  Love like rain, like the smell of a tangerine, like a surprise found in your pocket.

What should I do about the wild and the tame? The wild heart that wants to be free, and the tame heart that wants to come home. I want to be held. I don’t want you to come too close. I want you to scoop me up and bring me home at nights. I don’t want to tell you where I am. I want to keep a place among the rocks where no one can find me. I want to be with you.

This is where the story starts, in this threadbare room. The walls are exploding. The windows have turned into telescopes. Moon and stars are magnified in this room. The sun hangs over the mantelpiece. I stretch out my hand and touch the corners of the world. The world is bundled up in this room. Beyond the door, where the river is, where the roads are, we shall be. We can take the world with us when we go and sling the sun under your arm. Hurry now, it’s getting late. I don’t know if this is a happy ending, but here we are let loose in open fields.

Rescue me… The human condition seems to be one of waiting to be rescued. Will it be you? Will it be today? Will the world open in splendent color, spirit-blue, that aniline blue, ripe indigo or the tone of an unclouded sky? Say it will. Each other’s greatest fear. Each other’s only hope. I put out my hand and withdraw it at the same time. … Whatever will win you, I become. I disguise myself as your rescuer so that you will be mine.

This is not a love story, but love is in it. That is, love is just outside it, looking for a way to break in.

You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another.

When we were children, we used to think that when we were grown-up we would no longer be vulnerable. But to grow up is to accept vulnerability…. To be alive is to be vulnerable.

It’s better if I think of my life like that – part miracle, part madness. It’s better if I accept that I can’t control any of the things that matter. My life is a trail of shipwrecks and set-sails. There are no arrivals, no destinations; there are only sandbanks and shipwreck; then another boat, another tide.

We are friends and I do like to pass the day with you in serious and inconsequential chatter. I wouldn’t mind washing up beside you, dusting beside you, reading the back half of the paper while you read the front. We are friends and I would miss you, do miss you and think of you very often.

I felt as if I had blundered into someone else’s life by chance, discovered I wanted to stay, then blundered back into my own, without a clue, a hint, or a way of finishing the story.

“Don’t regret your life, child. It will pass soon enough.”

I opened myself to you only to be skinned alive. The more vulnerable I became, the faster and more deft your knife. Knowing what was happening, still I stayed and let you carve more. That’s how much I loved you. That’s how much.

You play, you win, you play, you lose. You play. It’s the playing that’s irresistible. Dicing from one year to the next with the things you love, what you risk reveals what you value.

He doubted her. You must never doubt the one you love.

But they might not be telling you the truth.

Nevermind that. You tell them the truth.

What do you mean?

You can’t be another person’s honesty, child, but you can be your own.

So what should I say?

When?

When I love someone?

You should say it.

She addressed her world honestly, searching for something deserving of the volumes of love she knew she had within her, but to each she would have to say, I don’t love you. Bark-brown fence post: I don’t love you. Poem too long: I don’t love you. Lunch in bowl: I don’t love you. Physics, the idea of you, the laws of you: I don’t love you. Nothing felt like anything more than what it actually was. Everything was just a thing, mired completely in its thingness.

Be faithful to that which exists within yourself.

I want to live for ecstasy. Small doses, moderate loves, all half-shades, leave me cold. I like extravagance. Letters which give the postman a stiff back to carry, books which overflow from their covers, sexuality which bursts the thermometers.

We meet, we don’t meet, we take the wrong turning, and still bump into each other. We conscientiously choose the ‘right road’ and it leads nowhere.

“I’m always missing someone or someplace or something, I’m always trying to get back to some imaginary somewhere. My life has been one long longing.”

You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.

I’ve learned that things change, people change, and it doesn’t mean you forget the past or try to cover it up; it simply means that you move on and treasure the memories. Letting go doesn’t mean giving up, it means accepting that some things weren’t meant to be.

‘And I, understanding what you did not say, fell in love with you because you did not say it…’

‘Some broken things you can’t mend. Some you have to put together very slowly, piece by fragile piece, waiting until the last bit of work is strong enough before you try the next. It takes a lot of patience.’

“Don’t ask for guarantees. And don’t look to be saved in any one thing, person, machine, or library. Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were headed for shore.”

I wanted to be more mature, more reasonable, I wanted to have a big, fat, forgiving heart that could contain all this rage and still find room for kind, beneficent love, but I didn’t have it in me. I just didn’t.

We can spend our lives letting the world tell us who we are. Sane or insane. Saints or sex addicts. Heroes or victims. Letting history tell us how good or bad we are. Letting our past decide our future. Or we can decide for ourselves. And maybe it’s our job to invent something better.

I come to a red light, tempted to go through it, then stop once I see a billboard sign that I don’t remember seeing and I look up at it. All it says is “Disappear Here” and even though it’s probably an ad for some resort, it still freaks me out a little and I step on the gas really hard and the car screeches as I leave the light.

Everybody has a different idea of love. One girl I know said, ‘I knew he loved me when he didn’t come in my mouth.’

But how long can a person float, looking at an empty horizon? How long do you drift before you call it quits?

What is beauty unless you intended to use it, like a hammer, or a key? It was just something for other people to use and admire, or envy, despise. To nail their dreams onto like a picture hanger on a blank wall. And so many girls saying, use me, dream me.

Why not? Because I was tired of men. Hanging in doorways, standing too close, their smell of beer or fifteen-year-old whiskey. Men who didn’t come to the emergency room with you, men who left on Christmas Eve. Men who slammed the security gates, who made you love them and then changed their minds. Forests of boys, their ragged shrubs full of eyes following you, grabbing your breast, waving their money, eyes already knocking you down, taking what they felt was theirs. Because I could still see a woman in a red bathrobe crawling in the street. A woman on a roof in the wind, mute and strange. Women with pills, with knives, women dying their hair. Women painting doorknobs with poison for love, making dinners too large to eat, firing into a child’s room at close range. It was a play and I knew how it ended, I didn’t want to audition for any of the roles. It was no game, no casual thrill. It was a three-bullet Russian roulette.

People just wanted to be loved. That was the thing about words, they were clear and specific-chair, eye, stone-but when you talked about feelings, words were too stiff, they were this and not that, they couldn’t include all the meanings. In defining, they always left something out.

In three days of battle, 150,000 men fought at Gettysburg. There were fifty thousand casualties. I struggled with the enormity of that. One in three dead, wounded or missing. Like a giant hole ripped in the fabric of existence. Claire died, Barry died, but seven thousand died at Gettysburg. How could God watch them pass without weeping? How could he have allowed the sun to rise on Gettysburg?”

He took my fingers in his, and for a long moment we remained still. Two old bodies linked together by our hands and by the thousands of tender words we no longer need to speak.

You stop bitching and blaming other people for the things they did to you (or didn’t do for you) and you learn that the only thing you can really count on is the unexpected. You learn that people don’t always say what they mean or mean what they say, and that not everyone will always be there for you; and that it’s not always about you. So, you learn to stand on your own, and to take care of yourself; and in the process a sense of safety and security is born of self-reliance.

Turn your corset in for a habit and they’ll hate you all the same: whatever cannot be possessed is poison. The body is never bought but rented. Which is why he wants your heart, bound like feet, dancing only for him.

The night is the hardest time to be alive, and 4 a.m. knows all my secrets.

There came a time when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.

I am the girl who is lost in space, the girl who is disappearing always, forever fading away and receding farther and farther into the background. Just like the Cheshire cat, someday I will suddenly leave, but the artificial warmth of my smile, that phony, clownish curve, the kind you see on miserably sad people and villains in Disney movies, will remain behind as an ironic remnant. I am the girl you see in the photograph from some party someplace or some picnic in the park, the one who looks to very vibrant and you look at the picture again, I want to assure you, I will no longer be there. I will be erased from history, like a traitor in the Soviet Union. Because with everyday that goes by, I feel myself becoming more and more invisible, getting covered over more thickly and darkness, coats and coats of darkness that are going to suffocate me in the sweltering heat of the summer that I can’t even see anymore, even though I can feel it burn.

All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped. Youth, like pristine glass, absorbs the prints of its handlers. Some parents smudge, others crack, a few shatter childhoods into jagged little pieces, beyond repair.

I often think that the night is more alive and more richly colored than the day.

So, here I am, three years later and he’s three feet away from me. I could say hello, but I don’t want to disturb the memory.

We do not remember the days, we remember the moments.

She grabs her magazines
She packs here things and she goes
She leaves the pictures hanging on the wall, she burns all
Her notes and she knows, she’s been here too few years
To feel this old.

Oh, everything is gorgeous once it’s gone.

“What do you care about? What makes you happy?” “Nothing. Nothing makes me happy. I like nothing,” I tell her. “Did you ever care about me, Clay?” I don’t say anything, look back at the menu. “Did you ever care about me?” she asks again. “I don’t want to care. If I care about things, it’ll just be worse, it’ll just be another thing to worry about. It’s less painful if I don’t care.”

Don’t cherish anything. Burn it. The artist is the phoenix who burns to emerge.

A knife, it felt like a knife, and I’d discovered that despite everything that’s happened, I still had an endless untapped potential for getting hurt.

I am, at heart, still an addict, and for people like us, the thrill is always gone. It’s leaving before it has even arrived. Every time my dealer dropped off my fix of cocaine, I was already trying to figure out when he would bring more-and this was before I’d even gotten started on what was there. And pretty soon it becomes a way of life: there are no moments of joy, because you are always anticipating when the next possible moments of joy might arrive. As soon as tomorrow? As late as next year? Maybe in a week or two? Not that it matters, because you would not enjoy that joy either, you’d be too busy wondering where the next fix of fun would come from. Addiction is, in its essence, an inability to live in the moment

“Why me?”
“Why not?” The Listener’s expression was hard. “Be glad of the gifts you have been given. They will be needed, and there are many things worse in life than beeing needed.”

Adversity is like a strong wind…it doesn’t just hold us back from places we might otherwise go. It also tears away from us all but the things that cannot be torn, so that afterward, we see ourselves as we really are, and not merely as we might like to be.

I say good-bye. I will never see him or speak to him again. Not because I don’t love him, but because I do.

You can be anywhere when your life begins. When the future opens up in front of you. And you may not even realize it at first, but it’s already happening

I wanted only to try to live in accord with the promptings which came from my true self. Why was that so very difficult?

It is important to conclude things properly. Only then can you let go. Otherwise you are left with words you should have said but never did and your heart is heavy with remorse.

We are our own devils; we drive ourselves out of our Edens

We shall soon be far away from you, but then you would never know it. You don’t need anybody, inhuman that you are. How strange it is that we cannot do without you.

Sometimes I feel myself wanting to dig up the past and go back to where I feel regret, it’s hard to move on from a certain place in your life, but its the struggle to do it that gets you to where you need to go.

…we kiss. and it feels like we have just shrugged off the world.

there is no line between the ‘real world’ and ‘world of myth and symbol’. objects, sensations, hit with the impact of hallucination

…the blues are because you’re getting fat or because it’s been raining too long. You’re just sad, that’s all. The mean reds are horrible. Suddenly you’re afraid and you don’t know what you’re afraid of. Do you ever get that feeling?

I’d hate to break this to you, but you’re not really innocent here. You did all of this. You made me like you because of who you are when you’re around me. You made me feel what I feel because of what you did and when you did it. You made me want more because I can’t imagine you not being there. You helped this move along to where it is now. You’ve done all this. So screw you for making all of this happen and then wanting to take it all back.

And all the books you’ve read have been read by other people. And all the songs you’ve loved have been heard by other people. And that girl that’s pretty to you is pretty to other people. And you know that if you looked at these facts when you were happy you would feel great because you are describing ‘Unity’.

I always liked the story of Noah’s Ark and the idea of starting anew by rescuing the things you like and leaving the rest behind.

Do not cultivate too much attachment to things of the world, which appeal to carnal desires and sensual thirsts. A moment comes when you have to depart empty-handed, leaving all that you have laboriously collected and proudly called your own.

“Traveling is not just seeing the new; it is also leaving behind. Not just opening doors; also closing them behind you, never to return. But the place you have left forever is always there for you to see whenever you shut your eyes.”

Suddenly Kassandra was filled with the most unbelievable sense of generosity. It was in her power to give him something he wanted so much. She leaned forward again against him and whispered, “I do care for you. I think—I think I have loved you since I first saw you.” And she felt him move softly against her as if it were where he had always wanted to be. He was touching only her fingers; but that touch was somehow closer than an embrace.

As I started to picture the trees in the storm, the answer began to dawn on me. The trees in the storm don’t try to stand up straight and tall and erect. They allow themselves to bend and be blown with the wind. They understand the power of letting go. Those trees and those branches that try too hard to stand up strong and straight are the ones that break. Now is not the time for you to be strong, Julia, or you, too, will break.

Letting go doesn’t mean giving up… it means moving on. It is one of the hardest things a person can do. Starting at birth, we grasp on to anything we can get our hands on, and hold on as if we will cease to exist when we let go. We feel that letting go is giving up, quitting, and that as we all know is cowardly. But as we grow older we are forced to change our way of thinking. We are forced to realize that letting go means accepting things that cannot be. It means maturing and moving on, no matter how hard you have to fight yourself to do so.

At the first kiss I felt something melt inside me that hurt in an exquisite way. All my longings, all my dreams and sweet anguish, all the secrets that slept deep within me came awake, everything was transformed and enchanted, everything made sense.

I haven’t a clue as to how my story will end. But that’s all right. When you set out on a journey and night covers the road, that’s when you discover the stars.

She pulls her knees up to her chest quietly so as not to wake him, wrapped up tight in his sleep, and all she can think of are the sit-coms she used to watch. There would always be a pair of characters that everyone wanted to see together; they’d always get into silly misadventures and awkward situations and witty overly scripted banter would pervade it all, (that and about 17 metric tonnes of sexual tension) until the writers finally ran out of ideas and threw them into bed together a few seasons later.

I guess we are who we are for a lot of reasons. And maybe we’ll never know most of them. But even if we don’t have the power to choose where we come from, we can still choose where we go from there.

Some things are meant to be broken. Imperfect. Chaotic. It’s the universe’s way of providing contrast. There have to be a few holes in the road. It’s how life is.

When you love someone you are happy to take pain in their place, delighted to know that they’ll never have to experience it.

I nod, looking over at Blair. I didn’t like Beastman! and I ask the film student, “Didn’t it bother you the way they just kept dropping characters out of the film for not reason at all?” The film student pauses and says, “Kind of, but that happens in real life…” I stare ahead at Blair. “I mean doesn’t it?” “I guess.” She won’t look at me.

It’s the sense of touch. I think we miss that touch so much that we crash into each other just so we can feel something

A person likes to think of himself in a certain way, and when something happens that makes that no longer possible, you mourn the old self. The person you thought you were.

Clementine: This is it, Joel. It’s going to be gone soon.
Joel: I know.
Clementine: What do we do?
Joel: Enjoy it.

Joel: I don’t see anything I don’t like about you.
Clementine: But you will! But you will, and I’ll get bored with you and feel trapped, because that’s what happens with me.
Joel: Okay

I sense a learning: that much dumber people than you end up in charge. Look at the way things are. I’m no fucken genius or anything, but these spazzos are in charge of my every twitch. What I’m starting to think is maybe only the dumb are safe in this world, the ones who roam with the herd, without thinking about every little thing. But see me? I have to think about every little fucken thing.

When you were hung up on someone, you said his name a lot – it was like a little reference point that was always there. No matter what the conversation was, the name would always crop up in it.

When we’re incomplete, we’re always searching for somebody to complete us. When, after a few years or a few months of a relationship, we find that we’re still unfulfilled, we blame our partners and take up with somebody more promising. This can go on and on — series polygamy — untill we admit that while a partner can add sweet dimensions to our lives, we, each of us, are responsible for our own fulfillment. Nobody else can provide it for us, and to believe otherwise is to delude ourselves dangerously and to program for eventual failure every relationship we enter.

Perhaps the best way to have a love affair is to be the one leaving, not the one left.

Because I wanted to, I did. Where I wanted to feed, I fed.

Kaitlin thinks I’m claustrophobic, but that’s not true – I love elevators and small cars. What I don’t like is being exposed to unfiltered social contact, like at parties or meetings, when just anyone can talk to you with no other reason than that you happen to be there.

If I were really grieving, these daydreams would only make me feel worse in the long run. The farther you go from reality, the more it hurts when you come back.

Evolution can go to hell as far as I am concerned. What a mistake we are. We have mortally wounded this sweet life-supporting planet – the only one in the whole Milky Way – with a century of transportation whoopee. Our government is conducting a war against drugs, is it? Let them go after petroleum. Talk about a destructive high! You put some of this stuff in your car and you can go a hundred miles an hour, run over the neighbor’s dog, and tear the atmosphere to smithereens.

Now, he wondered what he had ever done in his life that had meaning, if there was anything one could do that had meaning, beyond having children, which seemed like nothing more than the fulfillment of biological destiny.

“I get irritated, I get upset. Especially when I’m in a hurry. But I see it all as part of our training. To get irritated is to lose our way in life.”

I realize now that the reality of things is not something you convey to people but something you make. It is this that gives birth to meaning.

But our trip was different. It was a classic affirmation of everything right and true and decent in the national character. It was a gross, physical salute to the fantasic possibilities of life in this Country–but only for those with true grit, and we were chock full of it.

…..Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run….but no explaination, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time in the world. Whatever it meant….

People are all over the world telling their one dramatic story and how their life has turned into getting over this one event. Now their lives are more about the past than their future.

So, this is my life. And I want you to know that I am both happy and sad and I’m still trying to figure out how that could be.

We accept the love we think we deserve.

… And in that moment, I swear we were infinite.

Faith does not protect you. Medicine and airbags … those are things that protect you. God does not protect you. Intelligence protects you. Enlightenment. Put your faith in something with tangible results. How long has it been since someone walked on water? Modern miracles belong to science … computers, vaccines, space stations … even the divine miracle of creation. Matter from nothing … in a lab. Who needs God? No! Science is God.

Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could

I feel like the minute you let them know that you need them, they use it against you. And the more you care, the more you want her, the less you can stand the sight of her. And everybody knows. Everybody can see it, but you. And you humiliate yourself so bad it’s like you become a ghost. And you think, ‘I am going to vanish in this pain.’ And the worst part is, you don’t. It just stays there. It just stays with you.

All men and women are born, to live, suffer and die; what distinguishes us one from another is our dreams, whether they be dreams about worldly or unworldly things, and what we do to make them come about… We do not choose to be born. We do not choose our parents. We do not choose our historical epoch, the country of our birth, or the immediate circumstances of our upbringing. We do not, most of us, choose to die; nor do we choose the time and conditions of our death. But within this realm of choicelessness, we do choose how we live.

Most of the energy we spend is like a footprint on moving sands.

Try to live your lost illusions. They are the spice of life.

If you expect the worst from a person, you can’t ever be disappointed… The pessimist takes a sort of gloomy pleasure in observing the depths to which human behaviour can sink. Everyone likes to have his deepest convictions confirmed; that is one of the most abiding of human satisfaction.

Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth, more than ruin, more even than death… Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man.

We seem to be going through a period of nostalgia, and everyone seems to think yesterday was better than today. I don’t think it was, and I would advise you not to wait ten years before admitting today was great. If you’re hung up on nostalgia, pretend today is yesterday and just go out and have one hell of a time.

It’s scary sometimes when you consider that the smallest decision you make can totally change your life. A single choice and you might be hitching a ride down a totally different highway of life. And the disturbing part of all this is that you’ll never know for sure what your life could be, would be, or should be. Gambles we all must take, but sometimes, the stakes are simply too high.

There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered.

The moment you wake up each morning, all your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals. And the first job each morning consists in shoving it all back; in listening to that other voice, taking that other point of view, letting that other, larger, stronger, quieter life coming flowing in.

When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.

I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid strangers in their birthplace, and the leafy lanes they have known from childhood or the populous streets in which they have played, remain but a place of passage. They may spend their whole lives aliens among their kindred and remain aloof among the only scenes they have ever known. Perhaps it is this sense of strangeness that sends men far and wide in the search for something more permanent, to which they may attach themselves.

Perhaps some deep-rooted atavism urges the wanderer back to lands which his ancestors left in the dim beginnings of history. Sometimes a man hits upon a place to which he mysteriously feels that he belongs. Here is the home he sought, and he will settle amid scenes that he has never seen before, among men he has never known, as though they were familiar to him from his birth. Here at last he finds rest.

In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: It goes on.

I thought, when I came upon her, that I was seizing hold of life… Instead I lost hold of life completely. I reached out for something to attach myself to – and I found nothing. But in reaching out, in the effort to grasp, to attach myself, left high and dry as I was, I nevertheless found something I had not looked for – myself.

Maybe people have to really suffer before they can risk doing what they love.

What you don’t understand, you can make mean anything.

Every addiction, she said, was just a way to treat this same problem. Drugs or overeating or alcohol or sex, it was all just another way to find peace. To escape what we know. Our education. Our bite of the apple. Language, she said, was just our way to explain away the wonder and glory of the world. To deconstruct. To dismiss. She said people can’t deal with how beautiful the world really is. How it can’t be explained and understood.

What I want is to be needed. What I need is to be indispensable to somebody. Who I need is somebody that will eat up all my free time, my ego, my attention. Somebody addicted to me. A mutual addiction.

To stand here and try to fix her life is just a big waste of time. People don’t want their lives fixed. Nobody wants their problems solved. Their dramas. Their distractions. Their stories resolved. Their messes cleaned up. Because what would they have left? Just the big scary unknown.

The one you love and the one who loves you are never, ever the same person.

For days now he had tormented himself with such notions. And he seemed to be getting deeper into the circular swamp of pure reasoning. It was his philosophy class all over again, where debate led not to solution or insight but to further and further debate. Words begat words. Thoughts begat a feverish preoccupation with thinking, with logic as such

The only way to stop being bored is to do something interesting. Or criminal. These days it comes to the same thing. Let’s do it now.

I wanted to write about the moment when your addictions no longer hide the truth from you. When your whole life breaks down,” says Palahniuk. “That’s the moment when you have to somehow choose what your life is going to be about

The sooner little brats are made and reared in artificial wombs, the happier we’ll all be. We’re never be really free until we finally sever the cord between sex and having babies. Then sex will be like art, done purely for it’s own sake.

He smiles as he walks away. Because it’s a good feeling, knowing you can walk away, knowing a little sadness no longer blows your life to pieces.

There’s one hole in every revolution, large or small. And it’s one word long—-PEOPLE. No matter how big the idea they all stand under, people are small and weak and cheap and frightened. It’s people that kill every revolution.

Yeah. I’m calling your “faith” bullshit. This man needs medical help if he can’t get through his life without something invisible to believe in. Y’know, I wouldn’t mind all this half so much if there was some historical truth in it. This whole concept of “faith”—of believing in something that isn’t fucking there—was invented by a man to cover up the cracks in the “christianity” he cobbled together with the Romans. This whole god thing comes from the days when our brains weren’t as connected up as they are now, and we all hallucinated daily

The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.

…and I have learned to live, as it were, with the idea that I will never find peace and happiness, either. But as long as I know there’s a pretty good chance I can get my hands on either one of them every once in a while, I do the best I can between high spots.

People often play at being nonconformists to mask their own feelings of not fitting in.

Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn’t nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand

I need a war around me to survive

I do not regret the things I’ve done only those I did not do.

When choosing between two evils, I always like to try the one I’ve never tried before.

I will never say the things that I want to say to you. I know the damage it would do. I love you more than I hate my loneliness and pain. They say true love only come around once and you have to hold out and be strong until then. I have been waiting. I have been searching. I am a man under the moon, walking the streets of earth until dawn. There’s got to be someone for me. It’s not too much to ask. Just someone to be with. Someone to love. Someone to give everything to. Someone must tell you that I was always afraid of the fury with which I loved you. It overwhelmed me. I thought it beyond comprehension, therefore my silence…To me you are more than a woman. You are a creature of beauty, a creation of a higher order. I will die knowing that no one will ever love you as I have loved you all these years. I will now attempt to say your name with my last breath.

I wonder how many people I’ve looked at all my life and never seen. It’s scary to think about. Point of reference again. When two people meet, each one is changed by the other so you’ve got two new people.

Most of us see life through a cloudy lens, trying to see the positive and avoid the negative, never knowing that it is the two forces together that make life worth living. Life without the positive is merely pain and life without the negative is forever delusion.

I don’t want to sound gloomy, but at some point of your lives every one of you will notice that you have in your life one person, one friend whom you love and care for very much. That person is so close to you that you are able to share some things only with him. For example, you can call that friend, and from the very first maniacal laugh or some other joke you will know who is at the other end of that line. We used to do that with him (Peter Cushing) so often. And then when that person is gone, there will be nothing like that in your life ever again.

My life is nothing but moments, individual moments that can only be truly remembered at that moment.

Nothing’s lost forever. In this world, there is a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we’ve left behind, and dreaming ahead.

Who am I? Who are you? That is to say, “Who are you really?” Do you know? Does anyone know? The restraints of this society make us put up so many walls of bullshit and facades to hide who we are that it is almost impossible to tell who anyone really is. We dig ourselves into a comfortable hole to hide away from the eyes of our peers, and it’s in this hole that we bury ourselves. Dig yourselves out. Claw your way back into the light of day. Let your true self breathe, and in doing that, live.

A pleasure is not full grown until it is remembered.

The glory of friendship is not the outstretched hand, nor the kindly smile, nor the joy of companionship; it’s the spiritual inspiration that comes to one when he discovers that someone else believes in him and is willing to trust him with his friendship.

There is in truth no past, only a memory of the past. Blink your eyes, and the world you see next did not exist when you closed them. Therefore the only appropriate state of the mind is surprise. The only appropriate state of the heart is joy. The sky you see now, you have never seen before. The perfect moment is now. Be glad of it.

I didn’t realize then that so much of being adult is reconciling ourselves with the awkwardness and strangeness of our own feelings. Youth is the time of life lived for some imaginary audience.

The division of one day from the next must be one of the most profound peculiarities of life on this planet. It is, on the whole, a merciful arrangement. We are not condemned to sustained flights of being, but are constantly refreshed by little holidays from ourselves.

We are intermittent creatures, always falling to little ends and rising to little new beginnings. Our soon-tired consciousness is meted out in chapters, and that the world will look quite different tomorrow is, for both our comfort and our discomfort, usually true. How marvelously too night matches sleep, sweet image of it, so neatly apportioned to our need. Angels must wonder at these beings who fall so regularly out of awareness into a fantasm-invested dark. How our frail identities survive these chasms no philosopher has ever been able to explain.

Character cannot be summoned at the moment of crisis if it has been squandered by years of compromise and rationalization. The only testing ground for the heroic is the mundane. The only preparation for that one profound decision which can change a life, or even a nation, is those hundreds of half-conscious, self-defining, seemingly insignificant decisions made in private. Habit is the daily battleground of character.

I am a part of all that I have met, yet all experience is an arch wherethrough gleams that untraveled world, whose horizon fades forever and forever as I move. How dull it is to pause, to make an end. To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!

There’s nothing terribly wrong with feeling lost, so long as that feeling precedes some plan on your part to actually do something about it. Too often a person grows complacent with their disillusionment, perpetually wearing their “discomfort” like a favorite shirt. I can’t say I’m very pleased with where my life is just now… but I can’t help but look forward to where it’s going.

The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them – words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they’re brought out. But it’s more than that, isn’t it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revalations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you’ve said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That’s the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller, but for want of an understanding ear.

If our lives are the sum total of the choices we’ve made, then we can not change who we are. But with each new decision, we can determine who we’re going to be.

There are many ways to love someone. Sometimes we want love so much, we’re not too choosy about who we love. Other times, we make love such a pure and noble thing, no poor human can ever meet our vision. But for the most part, love is a recognition, an opportunity to say, “There is something about you I cherish.” It doesn’t entail marriage, or even physical love. There’s love of parents, love of city or nation, love of life, and love of people. All different, all love.

He is sure he has seen her before. That’s the way it is in cities, he thinks. You see the same people again and again. It’s not a mystery, only the probability of routine.

Closing your eyes isn’t going to change anything. Nothing’s going to disappear just because you can’t see what’s going on. In fact, things will be even worse the next time you open your eyes. That’s the kind of world we live in, Mr Nakata. Keep your eyes wide open. Only a coward closes his eyes. Closing your eyes and plugging up your ears won’t make time stand still.

If I sound as if I’m always predicting ominous things, it’s because I’m a pragmatist. I use deductive reasoning to generalize, and I suppose this sometimes ends up sounding like unlucky prophecies. You know why? Because reality’s just the accumulation of ominous prophecies come to life.

Anyone who falls in love is searching for the missing pieces of themselves. So anyone who’s in love gets sad when they think of their lover. It’s like stepping back inside a room you have fond memories of, one you haven’t seen in a long time. It’s only a natural feeling.

People are born in order to live, right? But the longer I’ve lived, the more I’ve lost what’s inside me – and ended up empty. And I bet the longer I live, the emptier, the more worthless, I’ll become. Something’s wrong with this picture. Life isn’t supposed to turn out like this! Isn’t it possible to shift direction, to change where I’m headed?

Gliding through Times Square at three-thirty in the morning, and all the traffic is gone, and suddenly you’re alone in the center of the world, with neon raining down on you from every corner of the sky. Or pushing the speedometer up past seventy on the Belt Parkway just before dawn and smelling the ocean as it pours in on you through the open window. Or traveling across the Brooklyn Bridge at the very moment a full moon rises into the arch, and that’s all you can see, the bright yellow roundness of the moon, so big that it frightens you, and you forget that you live down here on earth and imagine you’re flying, that the cab has wings and you’re actually flying through space. No book can duplicate those things.

I miss everyone I’ve lost. I get so sad sometimes, I can’t believe I don’t just drop dead from the weight that’s crushing down on me.

Most lives vanish. A person dies, and little by little all traces of that life disappear. An inventor survives in his inventions, an architect survives in his buildings, but most people leave behind no monuments or lasting achievements: a shelf of photograph albums, a fifth-grade report card, a bowling trophy, an ashtray filched from a Florida hotel room on the final morning of some dimly remembered vacation. A few objects, a few documents, and a smattering of impressions made on other people. Those people invariably tell stories about the dead person, but more often than not dates are scrambled, facts are left out, and the truth becomes increasingly distorted, and when those people die in their turn, most of the stories vanish with them.

Lying there, at that moment, she seemed more tangible than anything I was capable of projecting onto her. I guess that was what kept me there a bit longer, kept me there when I knew I was already on my way out.

I realized that I had never acquired the habit of looking closely at things, and now that I was being asked to do it, the results were dreadfully inadequate. Until then, I had always had a penchant for generalizing, for seeing the similarities between things rather than their differences.

When I agreed to have dinner the other night, I was expecting to have a dull time of it, to slog my way through a couple of hours of awkward conversation and then dash for the door and head home. But I was wrong. I’m happy to report that I was wrong. It always stimulates me to discover new examples of my own prejudice and stupidity, to realize that I don’t know half as much as I think I do.

“Con men and tricksters run the world. Rascals rule. And do you know why?”
“Tell me, Master. I’m all ears.”
“Because they’re hungrier than we are. Because they know what they want. Because they believe in life more than we do.”

‘I’m taking this out of the mouth of William Tecumseh Sherman,’ he said. ‘I hope the general doesn’t mind, but he got there before I did and I can’t think of a better way to express it.’ Then, turning in my direction, Sachs lifted his glass and said: ‘Grant stood by me when I was crazy. I stood by him when he was drunk, and now we stand by each other always.’

“By the time a man gets to our age, Nathan, he’s little more than a series of exes. N’est-ce pas? In my own case, I could probably reel off a dozen or more. Ex-husband. Ex-art dealer. Ex-navy man. Ex-window dresser. Ex-perfume salesman. Ex-millionaire. Ex-Buffalonian. Ex-Chicagoan. Ex-convict.”

“… when a person is lucky enough to live inside a story, to live inside an imaginary world, the pains of this world disappear. For as long as the story goes on, reality no longer exists.”

The bond was still there, but as time went on A. began to wonder if it was not, in fact, a memory of that other bond, formed six years earlier, which sustained this bond in the present. For it turns out that after A. moved back to New York (July 1974), he no longer wrote any letters to S. It was not that he did not continue to think of him. But it was the memory of him, more than any need to carry on contact with S. into the future, that seemed to concern A. now. In this way he began to feel, as if palpably in his own skin, the passage of time. It sufficed him to remember. And this, in itself, was a startling discovery

“I’m sorry,” he said after a while. “It’s just, you know … It just seemed like such a normal day. I didn’t think I’d come home to find my whole life had changed.” I didn’t say anything. But I could have pointed out that most life-changing days happen without you expecting them. I’ve spent half my life expecting the worst, and it never happens. But on the day it does, it’ll knock me flat on my back anyway.

“We can’t let such an inevitable thing as death stand in the way of enjoying life while we have it.”

“I always found perfection an overrated commodity.”

… like many drinkers, he liked to think each new day drew a line under the day before.

It’s not unusual to find yourself seeking to comfort someone who has tried to hurt you.

“The mass media causes sexual misdirection: It prompts us to need something deeper than what we want. This is why Woody Allen has made nebbish guys cool; he makes people assume there is something profound about having a relationship based on witty conversation and intellectual discourse. There isn’t. It’s just another gimmick, and it’s no different than wanting to be with someone because they’re thin or rich or the former lead singer of Whiskeytown. And it actually might be worse, because an intellectual relationship isn’t real at all. My witty banter and cerebral discourse is always completely contrived. Right now, I have three and a half dates worth of material, all of which I pretend to deliver spontaneously. This is my strategy: If I can just coerce women into the last half of that fourth date, it’s anyone’s ball game. I’ve beaten the system; I’ve broken the code; I’ve slain the Minotaur. If we part ways on that fourth evening without some kind of conversational disaster, she probably digs me. Or at least she thinks she digs me, because who she digs is not really me. Sadly, our relationship will not last ninety-three minutes (like Annie Hall) or ninety-six minutes (like Manhattan). It will go on for days or weeks or months or years, and I’ve already used everything in my vault. Very soon, I will have nothing more to say, and we will be sitting across from each other at breakfast, completely devoid of banter; she will feel betrayed and foolish, and I will suddenly find myself actively trying to avoid spending time with a woman I didn’t deserve to be with in the first place.”

“In this way, in increments both measurable and not, our childhood is stolen from us — not always in one momentous event but often in a series of small robberies, which add up to the same loss.”

We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.

One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves.

There’s something about a woman standing by herself. People wonder what she wants.

People call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.

She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on. … far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.

Now that physics is proving the intelligence of the universe what are we to do about the stupidity of mankind? I include myself. I know that the earth is not flat but my feet are. I know that space is curved but my brain has been condoned by habit to grow in a straight line. What I call light is my own blend of darkness. What I call a view is my hand-peinted trompe – l’oeil. I run after knowledge like a ferret down a ferret hole. My limitations, I call the boundaries of what can be known. I interpret the world by confusing other people’s psychology with my own. I say I am open-minded but what I think is.

The probability of separate worlds meeting is very small. The lure of it is immense. We send starships. We fall in love.

When we killed what we were to become what we are, what did we do with the bodies? We did what most people do; buried them under the floorboards and got used to the smell.

Whatever it is that pulls the pin, that hurls you past the boundaries of your own life into a brief and total beauty, even for a moment, it is enough.

What will happen when there are no more Public Libraries and the World is on CD-Rom?
Where will we go, we exiles from actuality?
What will happen to vets who read Miss Steen
and young girls looking for visions beyond their allotted lens?
In the homogeneity of screen and disc who will find the disruptiveness of the page?
And will we invent fabulous stories of lost libraries where rooked urchins gather books from mile high branches of crazy shelves?

After loss of Identity, the most potent modern terror, is loss of sexuality, or, as Descartes didn’t say, “I fuck therefore I am”.

Shame. Unusual for a Catholic to feel shame. Guilt is our ticket. Guilt to confess, guilt to expiate, guilt, good riddance and gone. The priest understands that. Shame comes from an older and different moral sense, where the wrong-doer does not fear punishment, either in this world or the next, but fears that shrinking up of self, the loss that any small, mean, dirty or stupid act, charges to the soul.
If I cheat another, I cheat myself out of the person that I could be. If I wound another, I will eventually find the cut recalled to my own heart. There is no appropriate confession, only the will not to fail again so readily, perhaps because while failure can be forgiven it cannot be excused.

I like to be a hero, like to come back to my island full of girls carrying a net of words forbidden them. Poor girls, they are locked outside their words just as the words are locked into meaning. Such a lot of locking up goes on on the Mainland but here on Lesbos our doors are always open. Stay inside, don’t walk the streets, bar the windows, keep your mouth shut, keep your legs together, strap your purse around your neck, don’t wear valuables, don’t look up, don’t talk to strangers, don’t risk it, don’t try it. He means she but not when He means Men. Mainland is a Private Club. That’s all right boys, so is this.

This delicious unacknowledged island where we are naked with each other. The boat that brings us here will crack beneath your weight. This is territory you cannot invade.

When I say “I will be true to you” I must mean it in spite of the formalities, instead of the formalities. If I commit adultery in my heart then I have lost you a little. The bright vision of your face will blur. I may not notice this once or twice, I may pride myself on having enjoyed those fleshy excursions in the most cerebral way. Yet I wil have blunted that sharp flint that sparks between us, our desire for another above all else.

Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights: the accumulations of a lifetime gather there. In places the palimpsest is so heavily worked that the letters feel like braille.

Lies 1: There is only the present and nothing to remember.
Lies 2: Time is a straight line.
Lies 3: The difference between the past and the future is that one has happened while the other has not.
Lies 4: We can only be in one place at a time.
Lies 5: Any proposition that contains the word “finite” (the world, the universe, experience, ourseleves…)
Lies 6: Reality as something which can be agreed upon.
Lies 7: Reality as truth.

Thinking about time is to acknowledge two contradictory certainties: that our outward lives are governed by the seasons and the clock; that our inward lives are governed by something much less regular – an imaginative impulse cutting through the dictates of daily time, and leaving us free to ignore the boundaries of here and now and pass like lightning along the coil of pure time, that is, the circle of the universe and whatever it does or does not contain.

The Buddhists say there are 149 ways to God. I’m not looking for God, only for myself, and that is far more complicated. God has had a great deal written about Him; nothing has been written about me. God is bigger, like my mother, easier to find, even in the dark. I could be anywhere, and since I can’t describe myself I can’t ask for help.

To kiss well one must kiss solely. No groping hands or stammering hearts. The lips and the lips alone are the pleasure. Passion is sweeter split strand by strand. Divided and re-divided like mercury then gathered up only at the last moment.

There are many forms of love and affection, some people can spend their whole lives together without knowing each other’s names. Naming is a difficult and time-consuming process; it concerns essences, and it means power. But on wild nights who can call you home? Only the one who knows your name. Romantic love has been diluted into paperback form and has sold thousands and millions of copies. Somewhere it is still in the original, written on tablets of stone. I would cross seas and suffer sunstroke and give away all I have, but not for a man, because they want to be the destroyer and never be destroyed. That is why they are unfit for romantic love. There are exceptions and I hope they are happy.

“No life is a waste … The only time we waste is the time we spend thinking we are alone.”

Parents rarely let go of their children, so children let go of them. They move on. They move away. The moments that used to define them — a mother’s approval, a father’s nod — are covered by moments of their own accomplishments. It is not until much later, as the skin sags and the heart weakens, that children understand; their stories, and all their accomplishments, sit atop the stories of their mothers and fathers, stones upon stones, beneath the waters of their lives.

.. I always experienced a caress of apprehension as I climbed into the car on Sunday night, any Sunday night, and headed back to the motorway and Monday, to the flat or the flatlet, the street, the job, the tramp dread, the outside world.

Only in adolescence do we hear the first rumours of our own extinction, these rumours remaining vague until the irrefutable confirmation of the mid life, when it becomes a full-time job looking the other way.

This is where we really go when we die: into the hearts of those who remember us.

I don’t much like my life, but for some dumb reason, I want to be alive, because sooner or later, I figure it will work out. I should and could be in New York, taking steps toward making it work, but I’ve been trying that for years and it’s no longer feasible. I can’t do it anymore. I give up. I surrender.

Name all the people I have known and not one soul is finished, we are a litany of criminals-agains-perfection that will last forever, or at least until our time on this spinning puddle comes to an end.

John Laroche: You know why I like plants?
Susan Orlean: Nuh uh.
John Laroche: Because they’re so mutable. Adaptation is a profound process. Means you figure out how to thrive in the world.
Susan Orlean: [pause] Yeah but it’s easier for plants. I mean they have no memory. They just move on to whatever’s next. With a person though, adapting almost shameful. It’s like running away.

I put my hand on him. Touching him was always so important to me. It was something I lived for. I never could explain why. Little, nothing touches. My fingers against his shoulder. The outsides of our thighs touching as we squeezed together on the bus. I couldn’t explain it, but I needed it. How many hundreds of thousands of fingers brushing against each other does it take to make love? Why does anyone ever make love?

The first question I ask myself when something doesn’t seem to be beautiful is why do I think it’s not beautiful. And very shortly you discover that there is no reason.

Reach a certain moment in your life, and you discover that your days are spent as much with the dead as they are with the living.

… you can survive only if nothing is necessary to you.

Too many guys think I’m a concept, or I complete them, or I’m gonna make them alive. But I’m just a fucked-up girl who’s lookin’ for my own piece of mind; don’t assign me yours.

Once a thing is gone, that is the end of it.

The closer you come to the end, the more there is to say. The end is only imaginary, a destination you invent to keep yourself going, but a point comes when you realize you will never get there. You might have to stop, but that is only because you have run out of time. You stop, but that does not mean you have come to the end.

“We’re all victims of something, Mr. Effing. If only of the fact that we’re alive.”

If given the choice of going forward or backward, I for one wouldn’t have hesitated. I would much rather have found myself among the no-longer-living than the unborn.

What matters is not how well you can avoid trouble, but how you cope with trouble when it comes.

… the sudden knowledge that came over him that even alone, in the deepest solitude of his room, he was not alone, or, more precisely, that the moment he began to try to speak of that solitude, he had become more than just himself. Memory, therefore, not simply as the resurrection of one’s private past, but an immersion in the past of others, which is to say: history – which one both participates in and is a witness to, is a part of and apart from. Everything, therefore, is present in his mind at once, as if each element were reflecting the light of all the others, and at the same time emitting its own unique and unquenchable radiance. If there is any reason for him to be in this room now, it is because there is something inside him hungering to see it all at once, to savor the chaos of it in all its raw and urgent simultaneity. And yet, the telling of it is necessarily slow, a delicate business of trying to remember what has already been remembered. The pen will never be able to move fast enough to write down every word discovered in the space of memory. Some things have been lost forever, other things will perhaps be remembered again, and still other things have been lost and found and lost again. There is no way to be sure of any of this.

… he learned never to trust anyone. Not even himself. Someone would always come along to prove that what he thought was wrong, that it did not count for anything. He learned never to want anything too much.

There was a strange inevitability to it, he felt, as if their fluke encounter called for an extravagant response, a spirit of anarchy and celebration. They were not creating an event so much as trying to keep up with one … his desire for her was so powerful that it was already verging on a feeling of loss – for he knew that he was bound to disappoint her in the end, that sooner of later a moment would come when he would want to be back in the car.

I know you don’t love me, but that doesn’t mean I’m the wrong girl for you.

In the end, each life is no more than the sum of contingent facts, a chronicle of chance intersections, of flukes, of random events that divulge nothing but their own lack of purpose.

I consider myself a realist. Chance is a part of reality : we are continually shaped by the forces of coincidence, the unexpected occurs with almost numbing regularity in all our lives.

What’s agitating about solitude is the inner voice telling you that you should be mated to somebody, that solitude is a mistake. The inner voice doesn’t care about who you find. It just keeps pestering you, tormenting you — if you happen to be me — with homecoming queens first, then girls next door, and finally anybody who might be pleased to see you now and then at the dinner table and in bed on occasion.

Hazel finds it strange that here they are among ten thousand students, all free and equal in a godless world, most of whom spend their days praying for the glamour of Acts of God. These will come in the form of an amazing boy or a fabulous girl, or a fantastic exam result on zero revision. Everyone is hoping for a miracle, for a direct painless hit from a metaphorical thunderbolt, a kind of supernatural smart bomb to explode the start of their lives in the right direction.

There was always this same problem with the present moment. It was never laid out as placidly as the past, with its neat consecutive events, and you never knew quite as clearly where you stood.

It’s too late for Hazel to learn the people she meets now, where they’ve been and what they’ve done and why. They carry in themselves too much information from elsewhere, which takes too long to absorb and understand.

We might suppose that once we see the game, the game will be over – but no. That’s like telling someone who is quite drunk not to be drunk. We are drunk, perpetually.

There is no paradise lost, none to be regained. Why? Because you cannot avoid this moment. You may not be awake to it, but it is always here. You cannot avoid paradise. You can only avoid seeing it.

Perhaps it’s impossible to wear an identity without becoming what you pretend to be.

Claire and I never fell in love, even though we both tried hard. It happens.

Me-ism: A search by an individual, in the absence of training in traditional religious tenets, to formulate a personally tailored religion by himself

If I’ve learned anything in twenty-nine years, it’s that every human being you see in the course of a day has a problem that’s sucking up at least 70 percent of his or her radar.

You are the first generation raised without religion

Sometimes you can’t realize you’re in a bad mood until another person enters your orbit.

And then I felt sad because I realized that once people are broken in certain ways, they can’t ever be fixed, and this is something nobody ever tells you when you are young and it never fails to surprise you as you grow older as you see the people in your life break one by one. You wonder when your turn is going to be, or if it’s already happened.

.. how often is it we are rescued by a stranger, if ever at all? And how is it that our lives can become drained of the possibility of forgiveness and kindness – so drained that even one small act of mercy becomes a potent lifelong memory? How do our lives reach these points?

It struck me that it was much harder to love someone when you were together than when you were apart.

“Tough!” shouted Edwin. “Because the world doesn’t care. We can’t wish reality away. We can’t simply agree to close our eyes and hug ourselves into believing that old age, death, and disillusionment don’t exist. They do, May. Whether we like it or not. Life is just one damn thing after another, but it’s still the only game in town. We can’t afford to sleepwalk through it, because we’ve only got the one go around. Dum vivimus, vivamus! ‘While we live, let us live to the fullest.’ Dum vivimus, vivamus.”

“All right,” I said, “I’m glad it’s a girl. And I hope she’ll be a fool – that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.”

There was even a time when I was quite sure that I wanted to be dead, but I know now that what hurts is not so much that they don’t like you but the fact that you don’t have it in you to like them, or not enough anyway, not the way you’d want to or ought to.

Youth is insane. Later on you’ll still be insane, but without the benefit of youth.

‘You can’t cure people of their character,’ she read.

After this he had crossed something out then gone on, ‘You can’t even change yourself. Experiments in that direction soon deteriorate into bitter, infuriated struggles. You haul yourself over the wall and glimpse new country. Good! You can never again be what you were! But even as you are congratulating yourself you discover tied to one leg the string of Christmas cards, gas bills, air letters and family snaps which will never allow you to be anyone else.’

You write down what can be remembered: but the day is sufficient to it’s own illusions. You can never recover them. Memory commits you to the nuance.

Nobody wanted to leave and yet they were also itching to get away to validate the experience. Complete, they could enjoy it more. It would be part of their lives.

… I came to a point where I needed solitude and just stop the machine of ‘thinking’ and ‘enjoying’ what they call ‘living,’ I just wanted to lie in the grass and look at the clouds -
They say, too, in ancient scripture: – ‘Wisdom can only be obtained from the viewpoint of solitude.’

A pain stabbed my heart, as it did every time I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world

.. the whole thing was hopeless, besides which Lucille would never understand me because I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till I drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.

What is that feeling when you’re driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? – it’s the too-huge world vaulting us, and it’s good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.

Years before, I had met a clever nervy boy in Spain, who went everywhere with a copy of Solzhenitsyn under his arm and thought about things too much for his own good. He told me once, sitting up late in a deserted bar looking out over the sea, that the saddest two words in the English language were Too Late.

Young people explode with their discovery of the world and the newness of life … So many things are happening for the first time. What young people don’t realize is that so much is happening for the last time as well. The world is both opening and closing at once.

Everything that happens to us, everything that we say or hear, everything we see with our own eyes or we articulate with our tongue, everything that enters through our ears, everything we are witness to (and for which we are therefore partly responsible) must find a recipient outside ourselves and we choose that recipient according to what happens or what we are told or even according to what we ourselves say. Each thing must be told to someone – though not necessarily always to the same person – and each thing will undergo a selection process, the way someone out shopping one afternoon might scrutinise, set aside and assess presents for the season to come. Everything must be told at least once although, as Rylands had determined, with all the weight of literary authority behind him, it must be told when the time is right or, which comes to the same thing, at the right moment, and sometimes, if you fail to recognise that right moment or deliberately let is pass, there will never again be another. That moment presents itself sometimes (usually) in an immediate unequivocal and urgent manner, but equally often, as is the case with the greatest secrets, it presents itself only dimly and only after decades have passed. But no secret can or should be kept from everybody for ever; once in its life, once in the lifetime of that secret, it is obliged to find at least one recipient.
That’s why some people reappear in our lives.

… there are four or five people in everybody’s life who must be informed immediately of what is happening to us, we can’t bare them to go on believing what is no longer true, not for a minute, for them to believe that we are married when we have just been widowed or that we still have parents when we have suddenly become orphans, that we have company when that company has just left, or are in good health when we have suddenly fallen ill. That they should think us alive when we are dead.

So much else goes on behind our backs, our capacity for knowledge is so limited, we cannot see what lies beyond a wall or anything happening at a distance, someone only has to whisper or move slightly away from us and we can no longer hear what he or she is saying, and our life might depend on it, all it takes is for us not to read a book and therefore not know about the principal danger, we cannot be in more than one place at once, and even then we often have no idea who might be watching us or thinking about us, who is about to dial our number, who is about to write to us, who is about to want us or seek us out, who is about to condemn us or murder us and thus put an end to our few evil days, who is going to hurl us over on the reverse side of time, on to its dark back…

… that is how times passes, constantly subjected to these ineffectual and contradictory struggles of ours, we allow ourselves to be impatient and to wish that the things we long for, but which are postponed or delayed, would happen at once, even though everything seems as nothing and to have happened too fast once it does happen and is over, repeating each beloved act brings us a little nearer to its end, and the worst thing is that not repeating it brings us closer too, everything is travelling slowly towards its own dissolution in the midst of our vain accelerations and our fictitious delays and only the last time is the last time

Because she saves up all the conversation she can’t have when she’s alone and lonely, she talks nonstop. She listens, but sometimes not really; sometimes one’s words are like a menu from which she’ll choose a word or phrase that will set her off.

He knew from long experience that a letter sent in fury merely put a weapon into the hands of your enemy. Poison, in preserved form, to be used against you long into the future.

… a person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn, not easily mended.

I couldn’t find the word for what I felt … It is clearly not true that without language there is no thought. I possessed a thought, a feeling, a sensation, and I was looking for its word.

Don’t ever walk by me as if I wasn’t there. Neither of us can be fooled. Never deny my reality, because in the end you’ll deny yourself.

Like many before me, I had come to the slow acknowledgement that the mind-altering substance of choice in a pressured, successful middle life is alcohol. Licit, social, with one’s mild addiction easily concealed among everyone else’s, and in all its infinite, ingenious manifestations, so colourful, so tasty, the drink in your hand triumphs by its very form; its liquidity is at one with the everyday, with milk, tea, coffee, with water, and therefore with life itself. Drinking is natural, whereas inhaling a smouldering vegetable is at some remove from breathing, as is the ingestion of pills from eating, and there is no penetration in nature that resembles that of the needle, except an insect’s sting. A single malt and spring water, a cool glass of Chablis, may improve your outlook by only a modest degree, but will leave unruffled the glassy continuum of your selfhood.

She loved him, though not at this particular moment.

Why the hell should sex get all mixed up with emotions? Forget it. It’s just skin rubbing against skin in the night. It’s just contact. There’s no need to get all soppy about it afterwards.

A book you read is not the same book it was before you read it. Maybe a girl you sleep with is not the same girl you went to bed with.

“I used to think that the years would go by in order, that you get older one year at a time … But it’s not like that. It happens overnight.”

“Unfortunately, the clock is ticking, the hours are going by. The past increases, the future recedes. Possibilities decreasing, regrets mounting.”

When did my youth slip away from me? I suddenly thought. It was over, wasn’t it? Seemed just like yesterday I was still only half grown up. Huey Lewis and the News had a couple of hit songs then. Not so many years ago. And now here I was, inside a closed circuit, spinning my wheels. Knowing I wasn’t getting anywhere, but spinning just the same. I had to. Had to keep that up or I wouldn’t be able to survive.

So that’s how we live our lives. No matter how deep and fatal the loss, no matter how important the thing that’s stolen from us – that’s snatched right out of our hands – even if we are left completely changed people with only the outer layer of skin from before, we continue to play out our lives this way, in silence. We draw ever nearer to our allotted span of time, bidding it farewell as it trails off behind. Repeating, often adroitly, the endless deeds of the everyday. Leaving behind a feeling of immeasurable emptiness.

His eyes were a curious mixture of innocent and knowing, like a naive character who’s just

happened to see too much.

Every generation wants to be the last. Every generation hates the next trend in music they can’t understand. We hate to give up those reins of our culture. To find our own music playing in elevators. The ballad for our generation, turned into background music for a television commercial. To find our generation’s clothes and hair suddenly retro.

‘Any insight of true breadth and profundity will inevitably be reduced to words. And the words will inevitably be reduced to themselves.’

‘Don’t go looking for symbolic significance in everything, Babe – you might regret it when you find it.’

Loneliness is a chameleon, not only different for each of us, but also different to each of us, varying according to our mood, place and time. The feeling of loneliness at 3 am may be quite different to how it feels at midday. When we feel lonely travelling, we may be missing the bluegums, or Bondi. If our lover has just left, it’s different again. Loneliness is a lyrebird with a different voice every time we hear it. This is one of its difficulties: we fear loneliness because it resists our understanding, it has so many guises, it is always a stranger. Perhaps noticing its changeability is a first step towards understanding.

Being alone does not always make us feel lonely: it can make us feel free, exhilarated, centered, relaxed, in touch with our sometimes hidden cores.

‘Maybe it would be best if we did not meet at all.’
‘But you said we were friends. How can we be friends if we never meet?’
‘Oh, it is easy,’ she said, and disappeared.

The French say that the best part of an affair is going up the stairs. Desire is almost always more thrilling than fulfillment.

Paul knows he shouldn’t really have bothered telling her anything about himself. She’s the kind of girl who takes part in those ridiculous discussions where you have to provide a punchline at the end of everything you say, every anecdote you tell. If anything ordinary happens, or sad, or tame, it’s just not good enough. The end always has to be funny.

First times aren’t something you forget easily, but the rest … My memory’s like the filing system of some boozed-up cataloguer: it’s full of gaps and improvisations, the drawers have fallen on the floor, the cards have been hastily swept together. Sometimes months go by with no filing activity at all, then the work turns feverish but sloppy. I have a filing cabinet full of memories, but where are the ones that can help me answer the questions that keep me awake these days?

If you’re going to go your own way, don’t expect anyone to come with you. If you are an artist and you do exactly what you want and not many people appreciate it, that’s just the way it is when you are going for your own. If you are a warrior of the soul in the present climate, then you will always be met with mediocrity and resistance. Do you care? Why should you? Why waste your time being frustrated when you don’t seem to “measure up” to the smirking cowards that line the highways? What did you expect? A parade? Open arms? Maybe you should take a step back and reevaluate yourself. Perhaps this is not the life for you. Perhaps you are not strong enough to live this way. It is only a few who can walk the line and thrive. I am not talking about casualties who are limping through it, looking like hell. I am talking about those who are filled with joy when they see obstacles and pain on the horizon.

… he said, a bit deflated, as if he preferred the house when he thought it was unattainable. To suggest he might one day own it robbed it of some of its charm.

I felt ashamed of myself. But not ashamed enough to hope it didn’t happen again.

I … I like being alive. It sounds obvious, but it’s true. I never stop wondering why I’m alive and worrying in case it’s all a mistake … but for what it is, I love it. But the trouble is, I get tired. I think about it too much. And sometimes, if I’m lucky, some things give me back a sense of being glad I’m alive. A Mozart symphony, a hot frankfurter sausage in a cob, the smell of acetone. They revive my curiosity about living. They give me a new grip on being alive. Or sometimes a book does it. Almost never a person. I sometimes think people are the most uninteresting things in the whole universe. They only reflect the defeat I always carry around with me.

I was happy but happy is an adult word. You don’t have to ask a child about happy, you see it. They are or they are not. Adults talk about being happy because largely they are not. Talking about it is the same as trying to catch the wind. Much easier to let it blow all over you. This is where I disagree with the philosophers. They talk about passionate things but there is no passion in them. Never talk happiness with a philosopher.

Lovers are not at their best when it matters. Mouths dry up, palms sweat, conversation flags and all the time the heart is threatening to fly from the body once and for all. Lovers have been known to have heart attacks. Lovers drink too much from nervousness and cannot perform. They eat too little and faint during their fervently wished consummation. They do not stroke the favoured cat and their face-paint comes loose. This is not all. Whatever you have set store by, your dress, your diner, your poetry, will go wrong.

All our young lives we search for someone to love. Someone who makes us complete. We chose partners and change partners. We dance to a song of heartbreak and hope all the while, wondering if somewhere and somehow, there is someone searching for us.

It’s the heart that betrays us, makes us weep, makes us bury our friends when we should be marching ahead. It’s the heart that sickens us at night and makes us hate who we are. It’s the heart that sings old songs and brings memories of warm days and makes us waver at another mile, another smouldering village.

To survive the zero winter and that war we made a pyre of our hearts and put them aside for ever. There’s no pawnshop for the heart. You can’t take it in and leave it awhile in a clean cloth and redeem it in better times.

“… We are all of us doomed to spend our lives watching a movie of our lives – we are always acting on what has just finished happening. It happened atleast 1/30th of a second ago. We think we’re in the present, but we aren’t.”

In your life you meet people. Some you never think about again. Some you wonder what happened to them. There are some that you wonder if they ever think about you. And then there are some you wish you never had to think about again; but you do.

The friends who grew up with you deserve a special respect. The ones who stuck by you shoulder to shoulder, in a time where nothing was certain, all life lay ahead, and every road led home.

“Sometimes we don’t even realize what we really care about, because we get so distracted by the symbols.”

‘I love you,’ she whispered.
‘You hurt me,’ I said.
‘Same thing,’ she retorted.

There lies the beauty: I’m done with thinking. All it ever did was make me cry.

I’ll never be able to be here again. As the minutes slide by, I move on. The flow of time is something I cannot stop. I haven’t a choice. I go. One caravan has stopped, another starts up. There are people I have yet to meet, others I’ll never see again. People who are gone before you know it, people who are just passing through. Even as we exchange hellos, they seem to grow transparent. I must keep living with the flowing river before my eyes.
I earnestly pray that a trace of my girl-child self will always be with you.
For waving good-bye, I thank you.

Men are confused. They’re conflicted. They want a woman who’s their intellectual equal, but they’re afraid of women like that. They want a woman they can dominate, but then they hate her for being weak. It’s an ambivalence that goes back to a man’s relationship with his mother. Source of his life, center of his universe, object of both his fear and his love.

Well, you’re either lovers or you’re wanting to be lovers or you’re trying not to be lovers so you can be friends, but any way you look at it, sex is always looming in the picture like a shadow, like an undertow.

Sex should be wild. Unfettered and free. We’re animals, aren’t we? And, basically, we’re all wolves in sheep’s fur. I always wanted more. Not frequency, I am not talking about frequency; although that would have been great, too. I wanted more intensity. I wanted to be out there, outside myself, outside my skin. I wanted sex to be like robbing life out of the jaws of death!

I have to believe in a world outside my own mind. I have to believe that my actions still have meaning, even if I don’t remember them. I have to believe that when my eyes are closed, the world is still there. Do I believe the world’s still there? Is it still out there? Yeah. We all need mirrors to remind ourselves who we really are. I’m no different. Now where was I?

With insomnia, you’re never really asleep; you’re never really awake.

This is your life and it’s ending one minute at a time.

And then… something happened. I let go. Lost in oblivion — dark and silent and complete. I found freedom. Losing all hope was freedom.

The people I meet on each flight — they’re single-serving friends. Between take-off and landing, we have our time together, but that’s all we get.

Our generation has had no Great Depression, no Great War. Our war is spiritual. Our depression is our lives.

It’s only after you’ve lost everything that you’re free to do anything.

We are defined by the choices we make.

Hitting bottom isn’t a weekend retreat! It’s not a seminar! You have to forget everything you know, everything you think you know — about life, about friendship, about you and me.

The condom is the glass slipper of our generation. You slip it on, you dance the night away with a stranger, and then you throw it away – the condom, that is, not the stranger.

“Disaster is a natural part of my evolution,” Tyler whispered, “toward tragedy and dissolution.”

“I’m breaking my attachment to physical power and possessions,” Tyler whispered, “because only through destroying myself can I discover the greater power of my spirit.”

“The liberator who destroys my property,” Tyler said, “is fighting to save my spirit. The teacher who clears all possessions from my path will set me free.”

I guess I could be pretty pissed off about what happened to me… but it’s hard to stay mad, when there’s so much beauty in the world. Sometimes I feel like I’m seeing it all at once, and it’s too much, my heart fills up like a balloon that’s about to burst… And then I remember to relax, and stop trying to hold on to it, and then it flows through me like rain and I can’t feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life… You have no idea what I’m talking about, I’m sure. But don’t worry… you will someday.

Life and death, energy and peace. If I stop today it was still worth it. Even the terrible mistakes that I made and would have unmade if I could. The pains that have burned me and scarred my soul, it was worth it, for having been allowed to walk where I’ve walked, which was to hell on earth, heaven on earth, back again, into, under, far in between, through it, and above.

Know that humans are inherently weak and not good for much. That’s why you don’t want to have too many around you for too long. If they see that you are strong they will be attracted to you. Beware, for this is also always true about humans without exception: they will eventually attack what is strong and see it as their enemy. In their fear they display their need to bring what is seemingly above and beyond them down to their level

When was the last time you wanted to say it all to the right person? To have it all come out right, to surprise yourself at how together you could be. When was the last time you ever met someone who made you want to give it all to them? I mean give yourself to them. Where you couldn’t express yourself enough – like you wanted to cut off one of your arms to be understood. That’s it – you would cut your head off to have someone understand you. You know how pointless that one is. You know how many times you’ve smashed yourself to bits on the rocks.

A great numb feeling washes over me as I let go of the past and look forward to the future. Pretend to be a vampire. I don’t really need to pretend, because it’s who I am, an emotional vampire. I’ve just come to expect it. Vampires are real. That I was born this way. That I feed off of other people’s real emotions. Search for this night’s prey. Who will it be?

If you hate your parents, the man or the establishment, don’t show them up by getting wasted and hitting your car into a tree. If you really hate your parents, out earn them, out live them and know more.

. . . the companions of our childhood always possess a certain power over our minds which hardly any later friend can obtain.

Go without a coat when it’s cold; find out what cold is. Go hungry; keep your existence lean. Wear away the fat, get down to the lean tissue and see what it’s all about. The only time you define your character is when you go without. In times of hardship, you find out what you’re made of and what you’re capable of. If you’re never tested, you’ll never define you character.

One day can make your life, one day can ruin your life.
All life is, is four or five big days that change everything

Sometimes you see the world so clearly. And you know just what to do, and just when to do it. Just what you should’ve done and when you should’ve done it.

Wrap your skeleton around me
Weld your bones to mine
I need more than regular involvement
I need you to perform a miracle on me
Somehow still the horror inside
Please help me
I don’t want to die screaming
I don’t know if you can do it
Hold me in a violent grip
Outsmart me
I need something
A vacancy is growing inside me that I can’t control
Fuck it
Don’t even try
I’ll just abuse you
It’s all I know
I’m just afraid that I’ll hurt you
More than I already have

Somewhere someone is thinking of you. Someone is calling you an angel. This person is using celestial colors to paint your image. Someone is making you into a vision so beautiful that it can only live in the mind. Someone is thinking of the way your breath escapes your lips when you are touched. How your eyes close and your jaw tightens with concentration as you give pleasure a home. These thoughts are saving a life somewhere right now. In some airless apartment on a dark, urine stained, whore lined street, someone is calling out to you silently and you are answering without even being there. So crystalline. So pure. Such life saving power when you smile. You will never know how you have cauterized my wounds. So sad that we will never touch. How it hurts me to know that I will never be able to give you everything I have.

It is no surprise to me that hardly anyone tells the truth about how they feel. The smart ones keep themselves to themselves for good reason. Why would you want to tell anyone anything that’s dear to you? Even when you like them and want nothing more than to be closer than close to them? It’s so painful to be next to someone you feel strongly about and know you can’t say the things you want to.

Somewhere, someone isn’t impressed by your looks. Not all men jump through the hoops of your fire. You’re unbelievably boring to more people than you’ll ever know.

I want to meet a woman that will make me stop and listen to what she has to say. I want a woman who will make my jaw drop in awe. A woman that has little time for me. One who does not throw herself at me. One who respects herself who has a sense of herself. Where is she?

My pen knows what to do. I close my eyes and I see this girl who glows. A girl who radiates. When she smiles, she beams. She warms my heart. I open my eyes with a feeling of floating past all the garbage around me. I will emerge unscathed because I will not endeavor to hide myself from whatever is coming. Bring on the worst. I welcome it with open arms.

Yeah, he was burned out on women. Burned out on any kind of dealings with humans. They made him sick. He had become so cynical over the last few years that he had it in his mind that he would never meet anyone that would matter to him. Do you know what happened to that guy? He met this girl and she made him see that he was wrong. After he spent a short time with her, he felt all those old feelings come back. She brought him back to life.

There are so many hammocks to catch you if you fall, so many laws to keep you from experience. All these cities I have been in the last few weeks make me fully understand the cozy, stifling state in which most people pass through life. I don’t want to pass through life like a smooth plane ride. All you do is get to breathe and copulate and finally die. I don’t want to go with the smooth skin and the calm brow. I hope I end up a blithering idiot cursing the sun – hallucinating, screaming, giving obscene and inane lectures on street corners and public parks. People will walk by and say, “Look at that drooling idiot. What a basket case.” I will turn and say to them “It is you who are the basket case. For every moment you hated your job, cursed your wife and sold yourself to a dream that you didn’t even conceive. For the times your soul screamed yes and you said no. For all of that. For your self-torture, I see the glowing eyes of the sun! The air talks to me! I am at all times!” And maybe, the passers by will drop a coin into my cup.

It’ll destroy you if you try to make it mean anything to anyone but yourself.

If you hate your parents, the man or the establishment, don’t show them up by getting wasted and hitting your car into a tree. If you really hate your parents, out earn them, out live them and know more.

I don’t believe in fate or destiny. I believe in various degrees of hatred, paranoia, and abandonment. However much of that gets heaped upon you doesn’t matter – it’s only a matter of how much you can take and what it does to you.

I am ready for whatever’s coming. I expect nothing but to be let down or turned away. I am alone. Goddamn. The shit hurts sometimes, but I realize what I am, what I have become. The alien man waved his arms up and down and noticed that he couldn’t wave in the right language so he stopped.

I believe that one defines oneself by reinvention. To not be like your parents. To not be like your friends. To be yourself. To cut yourself out of stone.

The streets lie, the sidewalks lie, everything lies You can try and read it but you’re gonna get it wrong…all wrong The summer evenings burn and melt and the nights glitter but you’re gonna get it wrong And it’s gonna sink its teeth into your flesh and pull you to the bottom.

“My mind,” he said, “rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. I can dispense then with artificial stimulants. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation. That is why I have chosen my own particular profession, or rather created it, for I am the only one in the world.”

I see that a man cannot give himself up to drinking without being miserable one-half his days and mad the other . . .

She behaves as if she was beautiful. Most American women do. It is the secret of their charm .

That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me. But, it is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it, and think how different its course would have been. Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.

It may almost be a question whether such wisdom as many of us have in our mature years has not come from the dying out of the power of temptation, rather than as the results of thought and resolution.

She gave all her friends the impression that she was a woman to be envied, and she expended most of her energy in trying to behave in accordance with the image she had created of herself. Because of that she had never had enough energy to be herself, a person who, like everyone else in the world, needed other people in order to be happy. But other people were so difficult. They in unpredictable ways, they surrounded themselves with defensive walls, they behaved just as she did, pretending they didn’t care about anything. When someone more open to life appeared, they either rejected them outright or made them suffer, consigning them to being inferior, ingenuous.

We are changed souls; we don’t look at things the same way anymore. For there was once a time when we expected the worst. But then the worst happened, did it not? And so we will never be surprised again.

Perhaps all our loves are merely hints and symbols; vagabond-language scrawled on gate posts and paving-stones along the weary road that others have trampled before us; perhaps you and I are types and this sadness which sometimes falls between us springs from disappointment in our search, each straining through and beyond the other, snatching a glimpse now and then of the shadow which turns the corner always a pace or two ahead of us.

The problem with people who have no vices is that generally you can be pretty sure they’re going to have some pretty annoying virtues.

But now I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.

Nothing you’ve ever known is true. Nor nothing you’ve ever loved. You don’t know if there’s a Hell below you, or a Heaven above. The Truth, my friend, is somewhere out there, just waiting to be released. But before you embark on your great endeavor, know that you’ll never return to peace.

“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.
“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”
“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.

“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”

I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center.

Life is a tragedy for those who feel, and a comedy for those who think.

The ready availability of suicide, like sex and alcohol, is one of life’s basic consolations.

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say commonplace things but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the centerlight pop and everybody goes “AWWWW!!!”

I want to live my life so that my nights are full of regrets.

Think how utterly, evilly selfish it is to have a child. Think of it! “Oh, honey, wouldn’t a baby just be splendid? With its little hands, and its little feet and its little arms and legs and face and smile. Oh, we have to have one.” Great, and once it’s done, here is another little human to have to grow and learn what a sick collection of animals it is into which he’s been born; who has to learn the pointlessness of the asinine cycle of human life; the pain and unhappiness that accompany; the stupidity of the majority; the outrage of old age and death; the unfair circumstances of competition amongst organisms; the injustice of suffering, the absurdity of doctrines and ideologies; the cold blade of war; the inner demons of hunger, desire, self-loathing; who will be taught to hate and feel shame and fear and remorse, regret, guilt; who will one day suck from nonexistence another little conscious body to continue the hideous lineage of incessant dark-humor; and who will one day die, wrapped in a urine-stained, hospital-issued death-shroud, plugged into beeping, blipping machines, fed through dripping bags armed with needles and at the mercy of smart-ass little nurses, who know not yet that they, too, will be faced with this end. What more horrific and vile an act than that of having a child? There can be none. Torture is not worse, murder is not worse, nor rape or anything else, because it is birth that precludes them all. Were it not for birth, none of these other atrocities would have even a chance to be performed. It is the miracle of birth and life that drowns the light of the world, and it is that selfish obeyance of desire that is hung over the heads of all parents in the look of disgust on their disaffected teenager’s face. How can one repay an infinite offense?

Man is the only animal that contemplates death, and also the only animal that shows any sign of doubt of its finality.

I have forgotten more than many others have remembered.

Sooner or later we all discover that the big moments in life are not the advertised ones, not the birthdays, the graduations, the weddings, not the great goals achieved. The real milestones are less prepossessing. They come to the door of memory unannounced, stray dogs that amble in, sniff around a bit and simply never leave. Our lives are measured by these. You were born an original. Don’t die a copy. There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval. So mine’s a double and I’ll see you all in hell suckers!

The best way to waste your life is by taking notes. The easiest way to avoid living is to just watch. Look for the details. Report. Don’t participate. Let Big Brother do the singing and dancing for you. Be a reporter. Be a good witness. A grateful member of the audience.

Sleep away the years, sleep away the pain, wake tomorrow – a girl again.

Life is both sad and solemn. We are let into a wonderful world, we meet one another here, greet each other – and wander together for a brief moment. Then we lose each other and disappear as suddenly and unreasonably as we arrived.

Sometimes I don’t want to see the puppeteers, sometimes I just want to see the magic therein, and sometimes I just want to pry open the atoms and know why they spin.

Why is it that almost every human culture yet discovered has found it necessary to believe in an afterlife of some sort, but not a ‘before-life?’ Why are there so many versions of Heaven, Paradise and The Great Beyond, but almost none about The Great Before…

It was Christianity which first painted the devil on the worlds walls; It was Christianity which first brought sin into the world. Belief in the cure which it offered has now been shaken to it’s deepest roots; but belief in the sickness which it taught and propagated continues to exists.

If she had died, you see, I could have got it over with. There’s ways of dealing with death. There’s funerals and flowers and crying. It would have been terrible, but I would have known absolutely certainly that she wasn’t going to come back and that I was never, never going to see her again, and somehow I’d have got on with my life and with you kids. But while someone’s alive, there’s always a chance that they’ll come back again, so you never quite let go. I wanted her back, however much I hated her for going.

There are certain things in a man’s past which he does not divulge to everybody but, perhaps, only to his friends. Again there are certain things he will not divulge even to his friends; he will divulge them perhaps only to himself, and that, too, as a secret. But, finally, there are things which he is afraid to divulge even to himself, and every decent man has quite an accumulation of such things in his mind.

I don’t want a shoulder to lean on. I don’t need it. The whole idea of “Someone, that special someone!” is for me a load of shit. I must be fully contained. No leakage, no spill over. Dependency is weakness. It’s such a lie. Lying there in bed, in your lovers arms. She’s behind me, she believes in me. I am behind me. I believe in me. I don’t need any support group to keep my head together. I know what I have to do, so I should just shut up and do it.

. . .suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but – I hope – into a better shape.

“Perhaps I’m being unfair to you,” he said, still not sounding like himself.” My feeling must be of the species they call passion. . . One thing I know for sure: without you it’s the end of me, and with you it’s also the end. It makes no difference where you are: far or near, you’re always present. I also know that I could hate you a good deal more than I could love you. .. I’m sorry that I had to fall in love with someone like you.”

Well I believe in the soul… the cock… the pussy… the small of a woman’s back… the hangin’ curveball… high fiber… good scotch… that the novels of Susan Sontag are self-indulgent overrated crap… I believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. I believe there ought to be a Constitutional amendment outlawing Astroturf and the designated hitter. I believe in the sweet spot, soft core pornography, opening your presents Christmas morning rather than Christmas Eve, and I believe in long, slow, deep, soft, wet kisses that last three days. Goodnight.

Sipping a cup of tea, going for a morning walk, doing your work – all these small activities make up your living. And each part, each moment of living, is meaningful. You just have to be there; otherwise, who is going to experience the meaning? People go on drinking tea, but they never are there; their minds are wandering all over the world.

In describing my experience I am recording not what happened or what exists, but how I perceive it. In doing so I define myself. As I create my diary, I create myself.

When you finally go back to your old hometown, you find it wasn’t the old home you missed but your childhood.

Certain flaws are necessary for the whole. It would seem strange if old friends lacked certain quirks.

There’s stories and there’s stories… the ones with any worth change your life forever, perhaps in a small way, but once you’ve heard them, they are forever a part of you. You nurture them and pass them on and the giving only makes you feel better. The stories are just stories, they make one laugh or cry – but if they have any worth, they carry within them a deeper resonance that remains long after the final page is turned…or the storyteller has come to the end of her tale.

Good communications is as stimulating as black coffee and just as hard to sleep after.

Each of us wages a private battle each day between the grand fantasies we have for ourselves and what actually happens.

Monster – by Robin Morgan
Listen. I’m really slowly dying
inside myself tonight.
And I’m not about to run down the list
of rapes and burnings and beatings and smiles
and sulks and rages and all the other crap
you’ve laid on women throughout your history
(we had no part in it — although god knows we tried)
together with your thick, demanding bodies laid on ours,
while your proud sweat, like liquid arrogance,
suffocated our very pores.
Not tonight.

I’m tired of listing your triumph, our oppression,
especially tonight, while two men whom I like –
one of whom I live with, father of my child, and
claim to be in life-giving, death-serious struggle with –
while you two sit at the kitchen table dancing
an ornate ritual of what you think passes for struggle
which fools nobody. Your shared oppression, grief,
and love as effeminists in a burning patriarchal world
still cannot cut through power plays of maleness.

The baby is asleep a room away. White. Male. American.
Potentially the most powerful, deadly creature
of the species.
His hair, oh pain, curls into fragrant tendrils damp
with the sweat of his summery sleep. Not yet, and on my life
if I can help it never will be “quite a man.”
But just two days ago on seeing me naked for what must be
the three-thousandth time in his not-yet two years,
he suddenly thought of
the furry creature who yawns through his favorite television program;
connected that image with my genitals; laughed,
and said, “Monster.”

I want a woman’s revolution like a lover.
I lust for it, I want so much this freedom,
this end to struggle and fear and lies
we all exhale, that I could die just
with the passionate uttering of that desire.
Just once in this my only lifetime to dance
all alone and bare on a high cliff under cypress trees
with no fear of where I place my feet.
To even glimpse what I might have been and never never
will become, had I not had to “waste my life” fighting
for what my lack of freedom keeps me from glimpsing.
Those who abhor violence refuse to admit they are already
experiencing it, committing it.
Those who lie in the arms of the “individual solution,”
the “private odyssey,” the “personal growth,”
are the most conformist of all,
because to admit suffering is to begin
the creation of freedom.
Those who fear dying refuse to admit that they are already dead.
Well, I am dying, suffocating from this hopelessness tonight,
from this dead weight of struggling with
even those few men I love and care about
each day they kill me.

Do you understand? Dying. Going crazy.
Really. No poetic metaphor.
Hallucinating thin rainbow-colored nets
like cobwebs all over my skin
and dreaming more and more when I can sleep
of being killed or killing.
Sweet revolution, how I wish the female tears
rolling silently down my face this second were each a bullet,
each word I write, each character on my typewriter bullets
to kill whatever it is in men that builds this empire,
colonized my very body,
then named the colony Monster.

I am one of the “man-haters,” some have said.
I don’t have the time or patience here to say again why or how
I hate not men but what it is men do in this culture, or
how the system of sexism, power dominance, and competition
is the enemy, not people — but how men, still, created that system
and preserve it and reap concrete benefits from it.
Words and rhetoric that merely
gush from my arteries when grazed
by the razoredge of humanistic love. Enough.
I will say, however, that you, men, will have to be freed,
as well, though we women may have to kick and kill you
into freedom
since most of you will embrace death quite gladly
rather than give up your power to hold power.

Compassion for the suicidal impulse in our killers? Well,
on a plane ride once, the man across the aisle –
who was a World War Two paraplegic,
dead totally from the waist down,
wheeled in and out of the cabin — spent the whole trip avidly
devouring first newspaper sports pages
and then sports magazines,
loudly pointing out to anyone who would listen
(mostly the stewardesses) which athlete was a “real man.”

Two men in the seats directly behind me talked the whole time
about which Caribbean islands were the best for whoring, and
which color of ass was hotter and more pliant.
The stewardess smiled and served them coffee.
I gripped the arms of my seat more than once
to stop my getting up and screaming to the entire planeload
of human beings what was torturing us all — stopped because I knew
they’d take me for a crazy, an incipient
hijacker perhaps, and wrestle me down until Bellevue Hospital
could receive me at our landing in New York.
(No hijacker, I understood then, ever really wants to take
the plane. She/he wants to take passengers’ minds, to turn
them inside out, to create the revolution
35,000 feet above sea level
and land with a magical flying cadre
and, oh, yes, to win.)
Stopping myself is becoming a tactical luxury,
going fast.

My hives rise more frequently, stigmata of my passion.
Someday you’ll take away my baby, one way or the other.
And the man I’ve loved, one way or the other.
Why should that nauseate me with terror?
You’ve already taken me away from myself
with my only road back to go forward
into more madness, monsters, cobwebs, nausea,
in order to free you — men — from killing us, killing us.

No colonized people so isolated one from the other
for so long as women.
None cramped with compassion for the oppressor
who breathes on the next pillow each night.
No people so old who, having, we now discover, invented
agriculture, weaving, pottery, language, cooking
with fire, and healing medicine, must now invent a revolution
so total as to destroy maleness, femaleness, death.

Oh mother, I am tired and sick.
One sister, new to this pain called feminist consciousness
for want of a scream to name it, asked me last week
“But how do you stop from going crazy?”
No way, my sister.
No way.
This is a pore war, I thought once, on acid.

And you, men. Lovers, brothers, fathers, sons.
I have loved you and love you still, if for no other reason
than that you came wailing from the monster
while the monster hunched in pain to give you the power
to break her spell.
Well, we must break it ourselves, at last.
And I will speak less and less and less to you
and more and more in crazy gibberish you cannot understand:
witches’ incantations, poetry, old women’s mutterings,
schizophrenic code, accents, keening, firebombs,
poison, knives, bullets, and whatever else will invent
this freedom.

May my hives bloom bravely until my flesh is aflame
and burns through the cobwebs.
May we go mad together, my sisters.
May our labor agony in bringing forth this revolution
be the death of all pain.

May we comprehend that we cannot be stopped.

May I learn how to survive until my part is finished.
May I realize that I

am a
monster. I am

a
monster.

I am a monster.

And I am proud.