The Quote Mine

I am terrified by this dark thing That sleeps in me; All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.

O Earth how speechlessly loving you are, How stable, how certain, how ancient; how smilingly, Greenly, softly tolerant of all Upheavals; wherever we are, your invisible Arms embrace us all, day and night, Draw us with such huge and rapturous force Towards your calm, horizon-touching breast!

Now my feet cannot cease Nor my legs be at rest For the wild strains increase, And increases my zest, I long not for love, and I crave not for wine-- Let me live, let me die with this music divine.

"But the thing about hungry ghosts is they don't care if you believe in them."

"A slight to the doctor for the witch doctor is the best way to avoid a cure."

It's good to be alive and breathing, even when the air is toxic and the water can kill you.

"Drawing is the only honesty."

Crawl in. Whatever for good or ill grows within you needs you for a time to cease to exist.

The end of life is nothing compared to the end of love.

Hot night at the donga. Heat demons that chase away rain and crack the riverbed land on the city from before dawn break and by noon even the roads sweat. The kind of day where beasts either fall down or run to foul water, where people have nothing else to do but sit in shade and curse that shade don't block this kind of unseeing fire, and where old people's eyes roll in the back of their heads as they die. Night bring nothing but discontent because when the light leave it don't take the heat.

Is there a satisfaction in the effort of remembering that provides its own nourishment, and is what one recollects less important than the act of remembering?

Sometimes you can know it for yourself, how shitty you are, but still be miles away from sorry. That was me. I was not one bit sorry at all.

So, maybe love wasn't an unwieldy accessory in times of peril. Maybe it was the key to survival.

I think the hardest people in the world to forgive are the people we once were, the people we are trying desperately not to stir into the recipe of who we are now.

They say war is a crucible, where men are forged. I would venture that a monster is forged in a crucible as easily as a man is.

I ain't never stop trusting you. Like I ain't never stop loving you.

I would tell you now I was depressed then but then it did not need another name. The sidewalk turned velvet with salt. I took baths and stared, ate over the sink, shifting on and off each ankle, convincing myself of July. It was not special but it endured. Me too.