Anne Carson
- On Orchids, Plainwater: Essays and Poetry
We live by tunneling for we are people buried alive. To me, the tunnels you make will seem strangely aimless, uprooted orchids. But the fragrance is undying. A Little Boy has run away from Amherst a few Days ago, writes Emily Dickinson in a letter of 1883, and when asked where he was going, he replied, Vermont or Asia.
Anaïs Nin
- Henry and June: From the Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin
How well I know with what burning intensity you live. You have experienced many lives already, including several you have shared with me - full rich lives from birth to death, and you will just have to have these rest periods in between. Do you realize what a live force you are, just to speak of you in the abstract? I feel like a machine that has lost its motor. You represent everything that is vital, live, moving, rising, flying, soaring...
Susan Sontag
- As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh
It's not 'natural' to speak well, eloquently, in an interesting articulate way. People living in groups, families, communes say little - have few verbal means. Eloquence - thinking in words - is a byproduct of solitude, deracination, a heightened painful individuality.
Anaïs Nin
- The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. One
You have a passion for absolute knowledge. You will be hated because of this. There are truths human beings can't bear. And sometimes I do feel your relentless analysis leaves something out. You go about it like a surgeon with a scalpel, and as you cut, you kill what you cut into.
Anaïs Nin
- The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. One
I divined her life at that moment. She only believed in intimacy and proximity, in confessions born in the darkness of a bedroom, in quarrels born of alcohol, in communions born of exhausting walks through the city. She only believed in words which came like the confessions of criminals after long exposure to hunger, to intense lights, to cross-examination, to violent tearing away of masks.
bell hooks
- Agent of Change
To commit to love is fundamentally to commit to a life beyond dualism. That's why love is so sacred in a culture of domination, because it simply begins to erode your dualisms: dualisms of black and white, male and female, right and wrong.
Jeanette Winterson
- Gut Symmetries
I was the visceral place between mouth and bowel, the region of digestion and rumination. No doubt it is my spleen that refuses to locate the seat of reason in the head. No doubt it is my natural acidity that fears the milkiness of the heart.
Anne Carson
- The Anthropology of Water
My brother once showed me a piece of quartz that contained, he said, some trapped water older than all the seas in our world. He held it up to my ear. "Listen," he said, "life and no escape."
Jeanette Winterson
- Gut Symmetries
What would it be to love? Would it be the fields under rain, the vivid green the grass takes? Would it be the air current the bird finds? Would it be the fox and the fox hole? Would it be natural at all? Would it be lucky find or magic trick? Buried treasure or sleight of hand? Would I be the conjuror or the conjured? Would it be a spell or a song I sing? If I am a wound would love be my salve? If I am speechless would love be a mouth?
