my name is ree

“I learned to braid my hair back, so it would not catch on every twig, and how to tie my skirts at the knee to keep the burrs off. I learned to recognize the different blooming vines and guady roses, to spot the shining dragon flies and coiling snakes. I climbed the peaks where the cypresses speared black into the sky, the clambered down to the orchards and vineyards where purple grapes grew thick as coral. I walked the hills, the buzzing meadows of thyme and lilac and set my footprints across the yellow beaches. I searched out every cove and grotto, found the gentle bays, the harbor safe for ships. I heard the wolves howl, and the frogs cry from their mud. I stroked the glossy brown scorpions who braved me with their tales. Their poison was barely a pinch. I was drunk, as the wine and nectar in my father’s halls never made me. No wonder I had been so slow, I thought. All this while, I have been a weaver without wool, a ship without the sea. Yet now look where I sail.”

-Madeline Miller, Circe

“She is a virgin-harlot. She is vulgar, witty, knowledgeable to a depth that terrifies, cruel when she is most kind, unthinking while she thinks, and when she seeks to build she is a destructive as a coriolis storm.”

-Frank Herbert, Dune Messiah

“To be, or not to be, that is the question: Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And, by opposing, end them. To die — to sleep; No more; and, by a sleep, to say we end

The heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks

That flesh is heir to, — ‘tis a consummation Devoutly to be wished. To die — to sleep; To sleep! perchance to dream; ay, there’s the rub; For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause.”

-Shakespeare, Hamlet’s Soliloquy

“The aim of life is self-development. To realize one’s nature perfectly,—that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one’s self. Of course they are charitable. They feed the hungry, and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked. Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never really had it. The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion, —these are the two things that govern us.”

-Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“I’m trapped inside a tower, I’ve been locked and lost the key, Now the darkness that creeps in at night, Is my only company, No-one tries to save me here, Since they can’t hear my cries, I pass my days in solitude, Watch the world move on outside, This tower isn’t very grand, It’s really not that tall, But still I can’t escape it, I can’t break free at all, You can’t see this tower, Just believe it’s there instead, Because my tower isn’t made of stone, It’s all inside my head.”

-E.H Erin Hanson, Trapped

“The number of hours we have together is actually not so large. Please linger near the door uncomfortably instead of just leaving. Please forget your scarf in my life and come back later for it.”

-Mikko Harvey, from “For M,” Foundry (no.9, September 2018)