sedaris

It's popular to believe that every smoker was brainwashed, sucked in by product placements and subliminal ads. This argument comes in handy when you want to assign blame, but it discounts the fact that smoking is often wonderful. For people like me, people who twitched and jerked and cried out in tiny voices, cigarettes were a godsend. Not only that, but they tasted good, especially the first one in the morning, and the seven or eight that immediately followed it. (247)

Sedaris, David. "The Smoking Section." When You Are Engulfed in Flames. New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 2008. 240-323.

sycamore

Jeremy asks if I've had any good sex. That's when I'm more dramatic: I feel like there was a time, a number of years ago, when I felt a sense of so much possibility in sex, in sluttiness — and now it seems like everyone's so compulsive about finding dissatisfaction, and it makes me so depressed that I stop thinking about sex. I don't really have a libido, either — except at random moments when I'm on the bus or walking down the street and unfortunately it's not those random moments that are scripted to lead to something. (114)

Sycamore, Mattilda Bernstein. So Many Ways to Sleep Badly. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2008.

winterson

As it is, I can't settle, I want someone who is fierce and will love me until death and know that love is as strong as death, and be on my side for ever and ever. I want someone who will destroy and be destroyed by me. 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 the 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.

Winterson, Jeanette. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. New York: Grove, 1985.

winterson

"Don't you ever think of going back?"

Silly question. There are threads that help you find your way back, and there are threads that intend to bring you back. Mind turns to the pull, it's hard to pull away. I'm always thinking of going back. When Lot's wife looked over her shoulder, she turned into a pillar of salt. Pillars hold things up, and salt keeps them clean, but it's a poor exchange for losing your self. People do go back, but they don't survive, because two realities are claiming them at the same time. Such things are too much. You can salt your heart, or kill your heart, or you can choose between the two realities. There is much pain here. Some people think you can have your cake and eat it. The cake gets mouldy and they choke on what's left. Going back after a long time will make you mad, because the people you left behind do not like to think of you change, will treat you as they always did, accuse you of being indifferent, when you are only different. (160-161)

Winterson, Jeanette. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. New York: Grove, 1985.

winterson

My needlework teacher suffered from a problem of vision. She recognized things according to expectation and environment. If you were in a particular place, you expected to see particular things. Sheep and hills, see and fish; if there was an elephant in the supermarket, she'd either not see it at all, or call it Mrs. Jones and talk about fishcakes. But most likely, she'd do what most people do when confronted with something they don't understand:

Panic.

What constitutes a problem is not the thing, or the environment where we find the thing, but the conjunction of the two; something unexpected in a usual place (our favourite aunt in our favourite poker parlour) or something usual in an unexpected place (our favourite poker in our favourite aunt). (45)

Winterson, Jeanette. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. New York: Grove, 1985.

july

I often felt that I would be shot in the back with an arrow or gun, but that didn't happen. The world wasn't safer than I had thought; on the contrary, it was so dangerous that my practically naked self fit right in, like a car crash, it happened every day. (80)

July, Miranda. "Something That Needs Nothing." No One Belongs Here More Than You. New York: Scribner, 2007. 63-91.

july

And it struck me that maybe True magazine had been wrong. Maybe there are no New Men. Maybe there are only the living and the dead, and all those who are living deserve each other and are equal to each other. I pushed his shoulders back so that he was upright in his chair again. I didn't know anything about epilepsy, but I had imagined more shaking. I moved his hair out of his face. I put my hand under his nose and felt gentle, even breaths. I pressed my lips against his ear and whispered again, It's not your fault. Perhaps this was really the only thing I had ever wanted to say to anyone, and be told. (6-7)

July, Miranda. "The Shared Patio." No One Belongs Here More Than You. New York: Scribner, 2007. 1-11.

baldwin

"I mean you could have been fair to me by despising me a little less."

"I'm sorry. But I think, since you bring it up, that a lot of your life is despicable."

"I could say the same about yours," said Jacques. "There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one's head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people's pain. You ought to have some apprehension that the man you see before you was once even younger than you are now and arrived at his present wretchedness by imperceptible degrees."

There was a silence for a moment, threatened, from a distance, by that laugh of Giovanni's.

"Tell me," I said at last," is there really no other way for you but this? To kneel down forever before an army of boys for just five dirty minutes in the dark?"

"Think," said Jacques, "of the men who have kneeled before you while you thought of something else and pretended that nothing was happening down there in the dark between your legs."

I stared at the amber cognac and at the wet rings on the metal. Deep down, trapped in the metal, the outline of my own face looked upward hopelessly at me.

"You think," he persisted, "that my life is shameful because my encounters are. And they are. But you should ask yourself why they are." (55-56)

Baldwin, James. Giovanni's Room. New York: Delta Trade Paperback, 1956.

willis

This book will help you understand. We are not definable. We are not straight. We are not gay.

We are, however, Loathsome.

Willis, Danielle. Introduction to How Loathsome by Ted Naifeh and Tristan Crane. Singapore: ComicsLit, 2004.

orr

Time to shut up.
Voltaire said the secret
Of being boring
Is to say everything.

And yet I held
Back about love
All those years:
Talking about death
Insistently, even
As I was alive;
Talking about loss
As if all was loss,
As if the world
Did not return
Each morning.
As if the beloved
Didn't long for us.

No wonder I go on
So. I go on so
Because of the wonder. (83)

Orr, Gregory. Concerning the Book that is the Body of the Beloved. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon P, 2005.