September 11, 2018 etc.

Terry Baker. I just need to say his name today. Because he was beloved. Because I can’t escape our complicity in his death. We of the not-us yet.

Other things I need to say to the wild without expecting an answer:

1. Montaigne thought the best way to attack death was to think of it constantly—to imagine its presence when a horse stumbled or a tile fell from the ceiling. A constant imagining of death frees you from the yoke of mortal servitude by bringing death close, making it intimate and familiar.

2. Death is so intimate and familiar that sometimes I feel as if I’m cheating on my husband or neglecting my children by speaking so frankly to possible ghosts.

3. The writer’s role in selling the book, so different from the famish that leads you to write it. What do we redeem by getting published? Is there something to prove—some part of ourselves we’ve been excusing all these years only to suddenly discover it accepted?

4. Alternately, what do we redeem by being published? is another way of asking the simple question: What do we want from this world?

5. All of it.

6. Advice: Read Greg Jackson’s short fiction to practice juggling the freight of complex ideas with the shifting demands of scene and character. We are partly what we say but mostly what we think. 

7. Revision: Be careful with conditional verb tenses that don’t contribute to tone. The conditional moves the action away— “would be” makes an action occur continuously, for all time, and therefore less poignantly. The generalization reduces the immediacy of the moment. Sometimes it’s better to remove the conditional when describing something hard because it makes it immediate and leaves space for forgiveness afterwards. Let it burn and die. Let it be truth.

8. Warning: Be mindful of the way in which female characters operate from passivity or powerlessness. Ask yourself questions that honor those complexities. 

9. Poetry prompt: Read Naomi Shabib Nye’s “Famous.” Notice how the poem is structured around the definition and circling of the title word. Write a poem that turns on the reframing of a certain word. Use that word as the title.

10. Poetry prompt: Read Czeslaw Milosz’s “Conversations with Jeanne.” Notice how Milosz breaks the stanzas and makes use of patterned white space. Think about the effect of cutting that one line alone in the middle of the poem. Now think of friends or family with whom you maintain an ongoing disagreement about a specific ethical question (maybe divorce, abortion, end of life, etc.). Write a poem addressed to that person. Try to nurture the same level of distance that Milosz deploys in his titling of the poem as a “conversation.” As you write, think about the difference between a conversation and a dispute.

11. “Let the stars stitch you to sleep.”

“I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.”

— W. B. Yeats

An alternate take on hotels and sex

Kudos to Slate for republishing Geoff Dyer's essay, "Sex and Hotels."  I looked forward to re-feeling those first-read frissons when I settled into our tackiest loveseat with Dyer onscreen.  Edging into the second paragraph, I was startled to find the shoulders stiffening, the head shaking slowly, the lips tightening for a scrimmage. Frequently the female sitting on her hands to keep from asking the speaker that please-please-answer question, I am also the one who keeps a pen and notebook nearby to extinguish mental brush fires. The scribbler, the wilderness, the riot. 

What follows is my dialogue with Dyer's piece across the interim between first read and present.

"A hotel room is horny because it is clean: The sheets are clean, the toilets are clean, everything is clean, and this cleanliness is a flagrant inducement to—what else?—filthiness. Ideally, the room is so clean as to suggest that it has never been used. It cries out to be defiled. If the room is, in a sense, virginal, then the act of breaking the seal on bars of soap and other stealable accessories has something of the quality of breaking its hymen. Slightly archaic it may be, but to speak of “taking a room” is, in this context, pleasingly suggestive."

"In a sense" is like a cotillion skirt in that one can hide a cannon beneath it. Upon examining the metaphorical sense in which a room is "virginal", we are presented with the likelihood of hymen. Considering the hymen-optics wherein cracking the seal on bars of soap and other cheap bathroom accouterments resemble the act of breaking a hymen, it becomes less clear which virginity is being tainted. I don't understand the virgin metaphor unless the hotel room is a born-again virgin of the megachurch type, in which case I don't understand what business the fetishization of mega-churchings has to do with the illicit, furtive sex we seek in hotels. 

The immaculate cleanness of the hotel room isn’t alluring for its virginal connotation (especially since sex with virgins tends to be the least erotic and satisfying variant) so much as the blatant knowledge that I played no part in the work of spotlessness. I didn’t have to clean it and I won’t be responsible for any wine stains or disasters thereafter. Unlike sex with a virgin, the mess may be mine but the responsibility is on the house.

(Note: Dyer mentions this in passing but glosses over it as a form of luxury akin to having someone turn the sheets. The fact that I can't mention it in passing suggests a difference, perhaps, in the way Dyer and I experience daily household life. That difference is a minefield of untouched sex bombs.)

Maybe a hotel room is “horny” because it asks nothing of me except imagination tangled with banality, the perfect Moravian moment. And maybe a hotel room is thrilling because it’s secretly filthy; ultraviolet light would reveal splatters of sperm and bloodstains, a woman screaming while biting a hand, all the ways in which patriarchy follows us into the private spaces. This is the undertone of actual. Stanislaw Lem’s story floats through my head like a love letter I won’t share with my partner. My head is always a little dirtier than his, always more fascinated by the grime beneath the shiny American smiles.

"In international hotels, however, the passage through the lobby—a process of which checking in is the ritualistic expression—is also a passage from place to non-place. By checking in and handing over your credit card or passport, you effectively surrender your identity. By becoming a temporary resident of this non-place you become a non-person and are granted an ethical equivalent of diplomatic immunity. You become morally weightless."

Humbug. A hotel lobby is sexy not for its “moral weightlessness” but for its reckless, bureaucratized complicity in the exchange of transactional sex.

There I am, waiting in the brutal splendor of a hotel lobby where personal emptiness is magnified and reflected back from every gleaming surface-- I am breathlessly lonely, horribly aware, compressed by the emptiness spun into the architecture, the codified professional displays, the silent confession that all bodies in this lobby are missing something that going upstairs will not relieve. All the stairwell sex in the world will not unlonely us as we stand in the hotel lobby. When else is our weakness ever this stark?

"In the confines of the hotel you are no longer Mr. or Ms. Whoever, you are simply the occupant of a room. You have no history."

It’s not the relinquishment of identity that feels liberating—it’s the permission to fully inhabit the multiple, ever-mutating selfhood. To be Mrs. Someone and Mrs. None simultaneously. To be authentically doubled and dislodged from the strictures of rigid social roles.

Is there anything more volatile than a married mother who just turned forty and finds herself without a kitchen to clean, a dinner to cook, a family of mammals to over-feel and tend?

As a Romanian-Alabamian, I don’t play singles when it comes to identity. I need a polymorphous closet for all the costumes.

Basically, the more expensive the hotel the more arousing it is. There is, in other words, almost no distinction between the building itself and the prostitutes who ply their trade in it.

Money and price are a measure of preference, especially with respect to risk. For some of us, the lure of the thirty dollar motel room with vibrating beds and possible parking lot shoot-outs is more enticing than the platitudes of the fancy hotel. I need the sort of sex that acknowledges my desperation—the feeling that I’m risking my life for a moment of pleasure. The urgency matters. I don’t want to be insulated from the costs of my desire—I want to feel them panting down my neck.

Of course, it helps when the motel lacks an internet connection or a working television--because there is literally nothing left to do except sex. And conversation. And more sex. And not a single damned American Express card machine in sight.

Requiem for a third year without a mother

“There’s always a side door... into the dark...”

I don't have much to say that isn't family-portrait-wall-failure.

Not much that isn't empty-shell-of-a-Cat-Power-husk. 

I'm just trying to wake up. 

I'm still trying to wake up. 

“I used to dance alone of my own volition
I used to wait all night for the rock transmissions
So where’d you go
You led me far away
And let me go
Let me go...”

Writing the american evangelical + short fiction randoms

“We believe in the validity of male emotions more than we believe in validity of female emotions. We are a society that doubts women who report their own experiences of what a man was like or what an experience was like. That’s rape culture, too. It functions across numerous variations on how relationships work. Maybe he’s this. He’s a good guy at heart…We make excuses for men left and right, back and forth. It’s really not a courtesy we do to women…”

— Alana Massey, interview with The Millions

Amanda Miska's twitter call-out for ex-evangelicals came to mind when I was reading a great  short story by Andre Dubus, "If They Knew Yvonne," told from perspective of a young devout Catholic male, offers insight into how abstinence education dehumanizes and perverts sex, with the costs imposed primarily on female. Here is the narrator in confession, speaking to priest:

“But I shouldn’t have had a girl, because I believed my semen was the most important part of sex, so the first time I made love with her I was waiting for it, like my soul was listening for it—you see? Because I wouldn’t know how I felt about her until I knew how I felt about ejaculating with her.” 

The ejaculate is rendered holy, primal, an expression in which the female body is essentially a vessel. Narrator continues:

 “So after that we were lovers. Or she was, but I wasn’t. I was just happy because I could ejaculate without hating myself, so I was still masturbating, you see, but with her—does that make sense?"

The prohibition on masturbation resolved by presence of appropriate vessel. And the perversion of language, whereby what narrator must be doing is "making love", since any other sexual activity is Satanic, the verbal construct is fascinating here, when he says: "I made love to her without knowing her.”

And I can't help thinking about incels... how they are bred... the water they tread.

Things are always happening here, but they are always the same things: children scuttle in and out of alleyways until they finally settle, tired and confused, against a wall; boys become men, who drift along until something catches their attention; women put their hands to their mouths and call their children home. Something is always happening here, but it's never exactly what we were waiting for, so we just go on with our lives, and what occupies us right now is waiting for my brother.

Beth Nugent's short story, "Another Country" (from City of Boys)

TM: What is the best part about living with another writer?

JB: Never having to explain why you don’t want to go out.

TM: What is the worst?

GH: Whatever plans you might have, they can get eliminated at any time if one of us is in the writing fugue. You just have to accept that your plans are canceled in that instance.

[Interview with Julie Buntin and Gabe Habash]

“But I can’t help thinking there are men who still somewhere deep inside them have an unconscious fantasy that one day they’ll be helpless again. And they don’t want the person who’s going to be looking after them to be thinking, ‘Fuck you, I wish you’d die in the night.’ Nobody wants that, they don’t, but then, I was terribly taken aback by this. You know, the critics would say, this is great writing, it’s really wonderful, she’s at the peak of her powers and all that kind of shit, but there’s this awful anger and I hated it and it was ugly and how could she have been so cruel? ”

— Helen Garner, interview with The Millions

If I write from that place, of longing, then the place I am writing about becomes like an obsession. I feel intense homesickness and idealize it in the same way. The place is mine and I can imagine it as an intense version of itself. That also means that I use the setting to serve the story and forget any urge to create a faithful portrait.

[Interview with Clare Cameron]

I remember vividly being a kid in school and learning about the Holocaust, and my question back then was “What would I do? Who would I have been?” And I couldn’t understand it, I couldn’t fathom how it could happen. And now here I am.

[Interview with Ethel Rohan]

Living with a sense of wonder, allows the seemingly trivial to insist on having meaning. It is not hierarchical. Children know this. They bestow great importance on a mouse on a counter, or a sticker of a unicorn prancing across a binder. As an adult, the act of judging one’s self and the world around you as insignificant is what leads us to lose our sense of wonder.

[Interview with Heather O'Neill]

"And what about your personal angel? There's one sitting right beside you now and yet somehow taking up no space at all. Since an angel has no substantial presence it can compress itself to the size of a synapse, can follow the extraordinarily swift and winding ways of a thought... Could our daily indecisions... be the contrast between what we truly want and where our concentrated knot of angel has taken us? Maybe we're compositions, evolving works of art for angels, and they're attracted to the elegant patterns they make of our fates."

Phillip Graham's short story, "Angel" (from Interior Design)

Fear vs. anxiety, unwritable characters, and my fear of certain men

Robert Musil said the starry sky is a social phenomenon, an edifice of shared fantasy. We subject ourselves to its boundaries by creating it.

“… the act of telling a story is also a device to appropriate it.”

— Ilan Stevens, LOVE AND LANGUAGE

Confession: I am afraid of white men. Due to an event in my life, my heart races when I find myself alone on a sidewalk with a white man. I alternate between defensiveness, submission, and silence when in the presence of white men. These feelings do not exist around men of color. The grippingness of these feelings--their physicality and power--makes it very easy for me say, simply, these feelings do not exist when I am around men of color.

What's the point?

Fear is often the causal prompt for rational behavior. You should back away from a rattlesnake. But reaction to threat can also be irrational if the goal is to prove mastery rather than protect self. Our culture is replete with threat responses that focus on managing appearance rather than responding rationally to actual threat.

A good friend of mine is afraid of being alone with black men. She traces it to the experience of being raped by a black man in her apartment. The rapist, a serial offender, was eventually caught and convicted by a racially-diverse jury; my friend served as a witness. He was a stranger, not a friend, not an acquaintance. He was a black stranger who raped her violently and left physical evidence on her body. Race, ease of evidence, and repeat offense made it likelier that he would be found guilty. 

No part of this story is fair. Not fair that a black serial rapist is more likely to get convicted than a white serial rapist. Not fair that serial rapists of any color continue to unleash their hatred on female bodies. 

“The poet today must be twice-born. She must have begun as a poet, she must have understood the suffering of the world as political, and gone through politics, and on the other side of politics she must be reborn again as a poet.”

— Adrienne Rich, Notebook, 17 March 1974

My friend knows her fear is statistically insignificant and yet the salience of this fear is rooted in her physical experience of being raped--her memories of the rape, itself, and the way her mind-body chemicals processed the physical violation. 

When we walk down the street together, we alternate between fearing every man and fearing not a single one of them. 

Native American women are 2.5 to 3.5 times more likely to experience sexual assault compared to the statistics of all other races. * 79% of victims of anti-LGBTQ hate crime murders are people of color, with 82% being trans women of color in 2009. * About 9 in 10 Native/American Indian victims of rape or sexual assault were estimated to have had assailants who were of a different race. * In a study of Indian and Pakistani women, Indian and Pakistani women born in the US or who had immigrated before adolescence were more likely to experience physical violence, sexual assault, and stalking compared to those born outside of US or immigrated post-adolescence. * According to a study, Filipina women who were born in the US or immigrated before adolescence were more likely to experience physical and sexual violence (but not stalking) compared to Filipina women born outside the US or immigrated as adults. * Approximately 60% of Black girls experience sexual abuse by age 18. * According to a 2014 study, about 22% of Black women reported being raped and 41% experienced other forms of sexual violence. * While 80% of rapes are reported by white women, women of color are more likely to be assaulted than white women.

The story of a rape is often appropriated by the court and returned to the survivor in legal language. I'm not sure there is justice in a form that leaves out the neverendingness of terror on a street in a world filled with men and their guns and their bombs and their guns and their bombs...

“I’ve been compelled in some ways by describing my circumstances to learn to live with them. It’s not the same thing as accepting them.”

— James Baldwin in an interview with Paris Review

Anxiety is an unusual emotion in that it has no object. Fear has an object. Many times, our emotion management conversations replace natural fear with anxiety which should be controlled. So we miss the point and the raised pulse.

Given vague amorphous feelings—after an abortion, for example—the responses of others define our reactions and frame the space for the appropriate response of what we should feel. When we don’t know how to feel, we are more likely to seek a script. Therefore, what we do feel. Guilt. Misery. Blame. The social construction.

“I blame myself for my part in my crimes. Collusion is too little life, too little love.”

— Jeanette Winterson, ART AND LIES

Darwin thought of emotions as pre-actions, or symbols for deeds. Emotional work therefore requires us to manage bodily prep for a deed. Alienation from one’s emotions is therefore maladaptive and dangerous, fueling deep disconnect and making individual labile to manipulation.

“I’m not trying to be trendy but I’m better at addiction narratives than romance—it’s part of being a realist.”

— Character I can't quite write

Alina to character: "Who did you sell out for?" Find a cause.

The act of asserting the feeling coincides with the feeling itself. We are controlling our envy.

The evangelical idea of sadness as something one consents to feel.

I cannot tell you who to fear.

I will not tell you that the color of a man's skin makes him more or less guilty of rape.

I can swear on my blood that rape makes a man guilty of rape regardless of who he rapes--whether she is rich, poor, citizened, black, brown, white, or "unfuckable," (some defenses against rape charges are rooted in the assessment of how rape-worthy a woman might be).

Protecting rapists because they share our skin color or socioeconomic status make us complicit in the perpetuation of future rapes. At some point, we are responsible for the crimes we erase in order to salvage the heroes we think we need.

But there is no hero to save you in the alley. There is only the truth. And the woman who sells her sisters downstream for a man will find the water tastes a little like poison, a little like fear on her daughter's tongue. 

“Her voice carried the vowels like an old lady watering her favorite potted geraniums carefully, carefully, precious old thing. When what I need most was to see what she’d do when the pot broke. ”

Live in truth.

Notebooks: time, Marx, machines, love, tonsils

The struggle for time is the time struggle to feel one's self as a human being and more than just a worker. How do we parse the pain of having only two jobs and no time to read to our children? How do we keep from dehumanizing ourselves and recasting ourselves as ads? How do we stop judging single moms for the demands we make on them-- the punishment for failing to marry a man that works and resents us for it?

Marxism was rooted in the goal of freeing humans from industrial work. Stalin turned Marxism into a raison d'etat, a glorification of work, a production ethic. America is so materialist and non-subtly Stalinesque. Your job defines you.

*

Danish poet Dan Turrell read poems aloud to jazz like Rexroth and Ferlinghetti. He is buried in Assistens Cemetery in Copenhagen near Hans Christian Andersen and Kierkegaard.

“The child teaches the adult something else about love: that genuine love should involve a constant attempt to interpret with maximal generosity what might be going on, at any time, beneath the surface of difficult and unappealing behavior.

The parent has to second-guess what the cry, the kick, the grief, or the anger is really about. And what marks out this process of interpretation—and makes it so different from what occurs in the average adult relationship—is its charity….. How kind we would be if we managed to import even a little of this instinct into adult relationships—if here, too, we could look past the grumpiness and viciousness and recognize the fear, confusion, and exhaustion which almost invariably underlie them. This is what it would mean to gaze upon the human race with love.”

— Alain de Bottom, The Course of Love

Incorrigible idealist believing the future absolves bleaches of days past. Strange mythoscrotum of roots, fake blonde, cawl and all, commercial skat.

Blaise Pascal had us pegged among the men who seek turmoil as diversion, the object acquired now guilty of failing to elate. Happiness runs on four legs. We don't think to nail the pursuit itself against a wall and leave it for Americans on vacation to purchase.

There is a machine in you. A twinkling tin frame with special buttons. 

As economies shifted towards industrialization, man's success was increasingly likened to his ability to perform machine-like functions. Assemble a motor. The efficiency qualifier. 

The irredeemable flesh of laborers is worth less as the value of machines rises. 

Aubade to skin. 

Threnody of tonsils.

Notebooks: Mary McCarthy, posture, memory, terror

The question posed an empty chair. The author's privilege lies in the ability to stand outside the frame. Is this about me or him?

*

Clouds weigh too much today. Planes coming. People leaving. An old copy of The Story of O. The fear of terror is constant and multi-faceted. The color of my eyes:  a cumulus. 

*

I left my phone in the seatback pocket of Southwest flight to Chicago. After waking up from a dream about the Paris attacks. Then remembering the chaos of September 11th in DC. Feeling sick. It was Friday the 13th, a pop culture scenario. Terrorists are so modern-- chasing secular superstitions on which to lean. As if God gives a flying fuck about Friday the 13th or its sequels.

“I was none of these things but I became them. The qualities of a wife, response to male gaze.”

— Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry

Posture is a pose that suits the clothes. We select based on what we plan to feel, perform. Anything on Sunday might turn opera.Baroque, rococo-- a hectic harmony. The harmonium.

Mary McCarthy calls memory "a property of mind." Art is made when object of memory is converted by an act of imagination into something present. Her orphan childhood.

In her writing, characters and places grounded by sensations. It is the feeling that forms the memory. Dreams replaced thought and fantasy replaced understanding. Life imbued with mystery. Dreams as a defense mechanism for the stranded child.

Conventions of hiding: "... the true self, like the poor relative, must be taught to keep his distance."

Her mea culpa about fusing two memories-- what occurred and what was written, "...the literary truth had usurped the {actual truth].." (Brightman, 32) The impostor is carried away by her own performance, and elation replaces fear. Giving up her Catholic faith. End of hope for resolution to absent parents.

““Me? Oh, intellectually I believe in having a good heart, a chirpy penis, a lively intelligence, and the courage to say ‘shit!’ in front of a lady.””

— D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterly's Lover

I've always wondered what Lawrence meant by this. "Chirpy" is almost kin to "stirrup" here. 

*

The mention of Mom at odd intersections, junctures between chocolate and winter coats. The winter coats she purchased for the girls. Red wool dress coats with black velvet collars, a vestige of elegant and the fear that the girls will grow, outgrow the memories of her nurture and care. This world we walk into, soldered. The sundriness of year-old grief.

The abecedarian of abandoned (yet still possible) epigraphs

Acker (Kathy): “I'm no longer a child and I still want to be, to live with the pirates. Because I want to live forever in wonder. The difference between me as a child and me as an adult is this and only this: when I was a child, I longed to travel into, to live in wonder. Now, I know, as much as I can know anything, that to travel into wonder is to be wonder. So it matters little whether I travel by plane, by rowboat, or by book. Or, by dream. I do not see, for there is no I to see. That is what the pirates know. There is only seeing and, in order to go to see, one must be a pirate.”

Beckett: "Grammar and Style. To me they seem to have become as irrelevant as a Victorian bathing suit or the imperturbability of a true gentleman. A mask."

Cortazar: "I am an axolotl for good now, and if I think like a man it's only because every axolotl thinks like a man inside his stony resemblance."

Davis (Lydia): “I looked like a woman in glasses, but I had dreams of leading a very different kind of life, the life of a woman who would not wear glasses, the kind of woman I saw from a distance now and then in a bar.”

Esteban (Claude): "hobble, my pure spirit, the toads
snigger in their marsh."

Faulkner: "...not the heritage of Ham, not the mark of servitude but of bondage; the knowledge that for a while part of his blood had been the blood of slaves."

Gogol: "But nothing lasts long in this world. Even joy grows less lively the next moment. And a moment later, again, it weakens further. And at last it remerges insensibly with the normal mood, even as the ripple from a pebble’s impact becomes remerged with the smooth surface of the water at large. So Kovalev relapsed into thought again. For by now he had realised that even yet the affair was not wholly ended, seeing that, though retrieved, the nose needed to be re-stuck."

Hoban (Russell): “An ordinary mirror is silvered at the back but the window of the night train has darkness behind the glass. My face and the faces of other travellers were now mirrored on this darkness in a succession of stillnesses. Consider this, said the darkness: any motion at any speed is a succession of stillnesses; any section through an action will show just such a plane of stillness as this dark window in which your seeking face is mirrored. And in each plane of stillness is the moment of clarity that makes you responsible for what you do.”

Ionesco: "Nothing goes beyond the why, not even the nothing, because the nothing is not the explanation; when silence confronts us, the question to which there is no answer rings out in the silence."

James: "There was the whole of the rest of the house to traverse, and how should he screw himself to that if the door he had seen closed were at present open?  He could hold to the idea that the closing had practically been for him an act of mercy, a chance offered him to descend, depart, get off the ground and never again profane it.  This conception held together, it worked; but what it meant for him depended now clearly on the amount of forbearance his recent action, or rather his recent inaction, had engendered.  The image of the “presence” whatever it was, waiting there for him to go—"

Kingsolver: “God doesn’t need to punish us. He just grants us a long enough life to punish ourselves.”

Lispector: “And I want to be held down. I don't know what to do with the horrifying freedom that can destroy me.”

Mandelstam: "I propose to you, my family, a coat of arms: a glass of boiled water."

Nabokov: "It is fun to be present at the coming true of a dream, even if it is not one's own."

O'Brien (Edna): “There was I, devouring books and yet allowing a man who had never read a book to walk me home for a bit of harmless fumbling on the front steps.”

Paz (Octavio): "...I told her of my life with the wave. Nothing moves women so much as the possibility of saving a man."

Quintais (Luis): "Give what’s left of your future
to that house’s reinforcement.
Give it your attention and your affliction.
Give it the intelligence of your fear."

Rilke: "When I think back to my home, where there is nobody left now, I imagine that formerly this must have been otherwise. Formerly one knew (or perhaps one guessed it) that one had one's death within one, as a fruit its kernel. The children had a little death within them and the grown-ups a big one."

Stendhal: “But, if I sample this pleasure so prudently and circumspectly, it will no longer be a pleasure.”

Tsvetaeva: “I have two enemies in all the world, 
Two twins, inseparably fused:
The hunger of the hungry and the fullness of the full.”

Uribe (Kirmen): "Every one of us keeps forever someone else’s hidden side,
If it’s a secret, if a mistake, if a gesture."

Valenzuela (Luisa): “Because fear called her by her name. (Her own name, not fear’s name. Fear doesn’t have a name; it’s just the steady beat underneath a smile."

Winterson (Jeanette): “Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it. What then kills love? Only this: Neglect. Not to see you when you stand before me. Not to think of you in the little things. Not to make the road wide for you, the table spread for you. To choose you out of habit not desire, to pass the flower seller without a thought. To leave the dishes unwashed, the bed unmade, to ignore you in the mornings, make use of you at night. To crave another while pecking your cheek. To say your name without hearing it, to assume it is mine to call.”

X (Malcolm): “How can you thank a man for giving you what's already yours? How then can you thank him for giving you only part of what is yours?”

Yuknavitch: “That image of Joan of Arc burning up in a fire burned inside me like a new religion. Her face skyward. Her faith muscled up like a holy war. And always the voice of a father in her head. Like me. Jesus. What is a thin man pinned to wood next to the image of a burning woman warrior ablaze? I took the image of a burning woman into my heart and left belief to the house of father forever.”

Zapruder: “......I will
never know a single thing anyone feels,
just how they say it, which is why I am standing
here exactly, covered in shame and lightning,
doing what I’m supposed to do.”