You could drown in those eyes, I said/ So it's summer, so it's suicide/ so we're helpless in sleep and struggling at the bottom of the pool. ~Richard Siken
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The inessential parts will break off. ~Sarah Manguso
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Squeeze your eyes and then open them again ~ look, it is still there, the world as heaven, your body at the edge of it.~ Sharon Olds
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Hanley put on the skin of the saint. His genitals fitted nicely through the gap he had left and the skin at his neck matched hers exactly. He walked the corridors and for once left no bloody tracks behind. He stood before mirrors and admired himself. He touched his breasts and his belly and his thighs and there was no blood on his hands."Thank you," he said to her. "It is my heart's desire fulfilled. I am inside you. I am possessed by you."And then, in the the night, he kissed her on the brow and on the cheek and finally on the mouth. He gazed deep and long into her eyes. He traced the lines of her eyebrows gently, with the tip of his index finger. "Such a beautiful face," he said. He pressed his palms lightly against her forehead, her cheekbones, her jaw. With his little finger he memorized the shape of her lips.And then it was that Hanley, loved, desperate to possess and be possessed, staring deep into the green and loving eyes of the saint, saw that there can be no possession, there is only desire. He plucked at his empty skin, and wept.
~ John L'Heureux
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If the moon smiled, she would resemble you. You leave the same impression/ Of something beautiful, but annihilating. Both of you are great light borrowers. Her O-mouth grieves at the world; yours is unaffected... The moon, too, abases her subjects, But in the daytime she is ridiculous. Your dissatisfactions, on the other hand, Arrive through the mailslot with loving regularity, White and blank, expansive as carbon monoxide. No day is safe from news of you, Walking about in Africa maybe, but thinking of me. ~The Rival, Sylvia Plath *********************************************************** Chekhov was right. If there's a gun on the wall, it's got to go off. In real life, however, you never know where the gun is hanging...Jeffrey Eugenides *********************************************************** You stare at a head, a lushness of hair, and can only guess...Ian McEwan *********************************************************** Each of us has Heaven and Hell in him...Oscar Wilde *********************************************************** I'm searching for a brilliancy...Brian Morton *********************************************************** Some have great stories, pretty stories that take place at lakes with boats and friends and noodle salad. Just, no one in this car. But, a lot of people, that's their story. Good times, noodle salad. What makes it so hard is not that you had it bad, but that you're that pissed that so many others had it good...As Good As it Gets *********************************************************** The highest form of love is to be the protector of another person's solitude. {[~Rilke~]} ********************************************************** And life is pointless...What's so wrong with that?...3eb ******************************************************** For years. I've been sleeping. Helpless. Couldn't tell a soul~ Be ashamed. Of the mess you've made. My eyes never forget, you see. Behind me~ Silent. Metal mercies. Castrate. Boys to the bone~ Jesus. Are you listening? Up there. To anyone at all~ We are the fossils. The relics of our time. We mutilate the meanings. So they're easy to deny~ Be ashamed. Of the mess you've made. My eyes never forget, you see. Behind me~ Quiet. I am sleeping. Quiet. I am sleeping. Quiet. I don't trust you. I can't hear you~ Be ashamed. Of the mess you've made. My eyes never forget, you see. Behind me~ Behind me. The grace of falling snow. Cover up everything you know. Come save me from the awful sound. Of nothing....Smashing Pumpkins ************************************************************
** I wanna kiss you in Paris. I wanna hold your hand in Rome. I wanna run naked in a rainstorm. Make love in a train cross-country. You put this in me. So now what, so now what? Wanting, needing, waiting. For you to justify my love. Hoping, praying. For you to justify my love. I want to know you. Not like that . I don't wanna be your mother. I don't wanna be your sister either. I just wanna be your lover. I wanna be your baby. Kiss me, that's right, kiss me. Yearning, burning For you to justify my love . What are you gonna do? What are you gonna do? Talk to me -- tell me your dreams. Am I in them? Tell me your fears. Are you scared? Tell me your stories. I'm not afraid of who you are. We can fly... Poor is the man. Whose pleasures depend. On the permission of another...Madonna ************************************************************
*** If you feel pressure to say what you know others want to hear and don't have enough devil in you to surprise them, shut up....Richard Hugo ************************************************************
*** I don't want it...I just need it...to breathe.to feel.to know I'm alive...Tool ************************************************************
* this is the final insult... flat on your back... in the open casket... made up to look... like a harlot... wrinkled face twisted... into a mortician's... idea of bliss...Al Masarik ************************************************************
*** Fool enough to almost be it. Cool enough to not quite see it. Doomed. Pick your pockets full of sorrow. And run away with me tomorrow. June. We'll try and ease the pain. But somehow we'll feel the same. Well, no one knows. Where our secrets go. I send a heart to all my dearies. When your life is so, so dreary. Dream. I'm rumored to the straight and narrow. While the harlots of my perils. Scream. And I fail. But when I can, I will. Try to understand. That when I can, I will...S.P. ************************************************************
** One day you'll be a man. And men can do terrible things. Yes, they can...S. C. ************************************************************
* I'm talking about irrational, illogical passion. And you can go to all the forums on meaningful concepts, you can have all the shared interests you want, but the bottom line with what I'm talking about here was how her arms felt wrapped around when my neck when she was coming, how she looked at me when I made her laugh....The rest was all good and well, but it wasn't from the gut and it wasn't love...Richard Price ************************************************************
** The course of true love never did run smooth...The Bard *********************************************************** Always pyrotechnics. Stars spinning into phalluses. of light, serpents promising. Sweetness, their forked tongues. Thick and erect, patriarchs of bird. Exposing themselves in the air. You want what a man wants. Next time come as a man. Or don't come...Leda 3~Lucille Clifton *********************************************************** And I whisper in your ear~ I want to fucking tear you apart...She Wants Revenge *********************************************************** ...A creature full of eager, passionate longings for all that was beautiful and glad; thirsty for all knowledge; with an ear straining after dreamy music that died away and would not come near to her; with a blind, unconscious yearning for something that would link together the wonderful impressions of this mysterious life, and give her soul a sense of home in it. No wonder, when there is this contrast between the outward and the inward, that painful collisions come of it.~George Eliot *********************************************************** It reminded her of something she'd once read, about how an artist doesn't really need a great deal of experience. One heartbreak can produce many novels. But you have to have a heart that can break...Brian Morton *********************************************************** Influence isn't just a matter of copying someone or learning his or her tricks. You get influenced by writers whose work gives you hints about your own abilities and inclinations. Being influenced is largely a process of self-discovery. What you have to do is put all your influences into the blender and arrive at your own style and vision. That's the way it happens in music—you put a sitar in a rock song and you get a new sound. It's hybridization again. Hybrid vigor. It operates in art, too. The idea that a writer is a born genius, endowed with blazing originality, is mostly a myth, I think. You have to work at your originality. You create it; it doesn't create you.~Jeffrey Eugenides *********************************************************** 'Cause in essence, it means I'm human. There's not one person in the world that's not a living, walking contradiction...Nas *********************************************************** The moment before you kiss someone is the best moment of all, and I want to extend it. Once you've kissed, once you've tasted each other, entered each other's bodies, the entire business has been concluded in some way. This is why a kiss equals an infidelity. A fuck is just a full-body kiss. The kiss is what breaches the separation between two people. Nothing is ever the same after a kiss...Susanna Kaysen *********************************************************** Sometimes I attempt to kill in my dreams. But do you know what happens? For instance I aim at a bland, quietly interested enemy. Oh, I press the trigger all right, but one bullet after another feebly drops on the floor from the sheepish muzzle. In those dreams, my only thought is to conceal the fiasco from my foe, who is slowly growing annoyed...Vladimir Nabokov *********************************************************** Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home, That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every 'superstar,' every 'supreme leader,' every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. [...] There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known. ~ Carl Sagan, "Pale Blue Dot" *********************************************************** Like a painting they'd once seen in Venice Beach. It was a big abstract oil that was just green stripes. She never understood art like this, but Michael explained, "It's not a green painting, see? It's a red painting under a green one." He pointed to the edges, where the green didn't quite cover the red...Red under green. Her rawness just visible around the edges. ~Janet Fitch *********************************************************** There's beauty for you. There's self-knowledge. A different world, a different consciousness. Adam would have been stunned by the ugliness of that glass thing. No human scale. Top heavy. No grace, no warmth. It would have put fear in his heart. If that's going to be our religion, he'd've said to himself, then we're truly fucked.~ Ian McEwan *********************************************************** I used to feel so alone in the city. All those gazillions of people and then me, on the outside. Because how do you meet a new person? I was very stumped by this for many years. And then I realized, you just say, "Hi". They may ignore you. Or you may marry them. And that possibility is worth that one word. ~~(*Augusten Burroughs*)~~ *********************************************************** Always now, here in a truck, the moment again to dream of making love and sweat, this time to a woman, or even to all of them in some allowable way, to those boys, then, who couldn't cry, to the girls before they were women, to friends, me on my back, the sky over me pressing its simple weight into her body on me, into the bodies of them all, on me.~Albert Rios, Seniors
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Both the Chinese and the Greeks were in love with what mathematicians mean by elegance: not the heaping up of language, but the use of a few words with utmost effect. ~Jack Gilbert
