Books and Poems

"I will have poetry in my life... And adventure...And love...Love above all. Not the artful postures of love, but love that overthrows life... Unbiddable... Ungovernable... Like a riot in the heart, and nothing to be done, come ruin or rapture. Love like there has never been in a play..."

Book Quotations

Hocus Pocus, Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

"The excrement hit the air conditioning."

"The complicated futility of ignorance."

"We could have saved [the earth] but we were too doggone cheap."

"The most important message of a crucifix, to me anyway, was how unspeakably cruel suppossedly sane human beings can be when under orders from superior authority."

"It appeared to the Elders that the people here would believe anything about themselves, no matter how preposturous, as long as it was flattering. To make sure of this, they performed an experiment. They put the idea into Earthlings' heads that the whole universe had been created by one big male animal who looked just like them. He sat ona throne with a lot of less fancy thrones all around him. When people died they got to sit on those other thrones forever because they were such close relatives of the creator.

"The people down here just ate that up."

"The Elders made us think that the creator on the big throne hated strangers as much as we did and that we would be doing him a big favor it we tried to exterminate them by any and all means possible.

"That went over big down here."

Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley

"They lay side by side, barely touching, letting the power of the sun and the earth and the air move through them in harmony... It seemed that some time, a very long time ago, they had lain like this, content, timeless, in an endless, joyful peace, as if they were part of the standing stone which had stood here forever..."

"What just God would create some men wretched, and others happy and prosperous, if one life were all that they could have?"

Prodigal Summer, Barbara Kingsolver

"She wanted soemthing to eat, warm and particular. She would not let herself name this craving what it was so she named it food, a thing that normally didn't merit a second thought in her life here - she ate when she was hungry, and anything would do. But for this whole day her body had been speaking to her of its presence: an ache in the thigh, a need in the gut."

"She opened her eyes for fear she would fall into the darkness."

"If only she could sleep, only leave this place for a little while."

"You need sleep. You have to give in sometime. you get to the point where you just start wishing you wasn't living - and that's worse than being scared."

"The wrong words are impossible when there are no words."

"Could he possibly be as beautiful as he seemd to her?

Or was he just any man, a bone thrown to her starvation?"

"Physical pleasure was such a convincing illusion, and sex the ultimate charade of safety."

Slaughterhouse 5, Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

"I think you guys are going to have to come up with a lot of wonderful new lies, or people just aren't going to want to go on living."

"How nice - to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive."

"Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt."

The Awakening, Kate Chopin

"The past was nothing to her; offered no lesson which she was willing to heed. The future was a mystery she never attempted to penetrate. The present alone was significant, was hers, to torture her as it was doing then with the biting conviction that she had lost that which she had held, that she had been denied that which her impassioned, newly awakened being demanded."

"She felt as if a mist had been lifted from her eyes, enabling her to look upon and comprehend that significance of life, that monster made up of beauty and brutality."

"But the beginning of things, of a world especially, is necessarily vague, tangled, chaotic, and exceedingly disturbing. How few of us ever emerge from such beginning! How many souls perish in its tumult!"

"The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude; to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation. The voice of the sea speaks to the soul. The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace."

Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte

"I never told my love vocally, still, if looks have language, the merest idiot might have guessed I was over head and ears..."

"Be with me always. Take any form. Drive me mad. Only do not leave me in this abyss where I cannot find you. I cannot live without my life. I cannot live without my soul..."

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Poems

The Lover

I am a goddess,
transcending your understanding of all that a goddess is and can be.
I am whole without your half,
But I wish to share because
numbers excite me and
our one is better than our two,
is better than my one, is better than your one,
and because I am first a lover.

I say these things in hopes of
stopping you from ending too hastily
that which will undoubtedly take hold of your thoughts and your memories for lifetimes,
so that while you eat,
while you drive home late at night,
while you sip your coffee quietly and feign immersion in the text you are reading
so as to avoid her eyes,
while you make love to some exciting stranger,
while you bathe,
while you dance,
your body will be possessed by a trembling so fierce
you will find yourself incapable of containing it,
even at your table,
at the wheel,
at some cafe,
under the stars with some mysterious stranger,
in the privacy of your shower,
on your stage.

You see, love is my calling.
You hear, and so you look away.
And sometimes the lyrics will escape
And you will miss losing yourself
In my music, in my m a z e.

Turn around now, and return
to your sweater, your sofa, your DVD player, your dog.
Many lives content themselves with these simple things,
and maybe you mean to be a statistic.

But if you leave, you will never know.

You will never discover the scent of roses on my skin
when you wake to the song of my mouth whispering your name,
a prayer so beautiful, it draws
tears and sighs and starry eyes
and can only be said in this voice
with these eyes
in this bed
in these legs
in this light
in this sigh
in this hour
sacred only to this pilgrim who sees something new each time she
rests her eyes on you.

Yes, leave now.

Save yourself from these hands
that will touch you under the table
as you signal the waiter for another bottle of wine,
from these lips that will brand you with kisses you know
must have been waiting on a fire for hours,
covering your entirety so that you will think her an artiste
and your skin her impatient canvas.

Protect yourself from this mind
that will duel with yours at whim
until you are exhausted and pleading insanity,
from this pen that will at times persuade you that there is no distinction
between a poem and a naked body,
that might at times capture your essence so well,
you would swear it was a mirror.

Leave now.

For who yearns to be pleasured so?
Certainly not a gentleman such as yourself,
who undoubtedly receives such propositions often
and with equal, if not more, fervor,
from women who fear God and man,
from women who count blessings and calories,
from women who love yes, but only at their leisure.

- Leslie Travis

Touched By An Angel

We, unaccustomed to courage
exiles from delight
live coiled in shells of loneliness
until love leaves its high holy temple
and comes into our sight
to liberate us into life.

Love arrives
and in its train come ecstasies
old memories of pleasure
ancient histories of pain.
Yet if we are bold,
love strikes away the chains of fear
from our souls.

We are weaned from our timidity
In the flush of love's light
we dare be brave
And suddenly we see
that love costs all we are
and will ever be.
Yet it is only love
which sets us free.

- Maya Angelou

"I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have gone ourselves." - E.M. Forster