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1) "What’s going on Johnny?

Come on, whatcha doing? How are ya? Poor Johnny. Touchy Johnny. In this mindset. How you are? Imagine. How’s our John-John doing? How’s he makin out, comin along, doing for himself? How’s he keepin? Fuck. Slung halfways out the window for a haul, cause that’s what this piss-arsed place is come to. Imagine that, tumbling out onto the street for the sake of a stale Number 7 cause where he might pollute his own room. Where he sleeps alone. Poor old Johnny."

2) "She’s just Madonna. She’s just a girl that turned, got scared, got talked into talkin. And she’ll show up in court lookin like she do, prolly wear that pink thing she’s got, and do her eyes that way she does em. That’s Johnny then, done for. As good as gone. But Johnny aint done for now is he? Not yet. No not yet. What have they got on him? Just, just . . . ahh fuck it."

3) "He fucken knows where Shiner’s been. And so much of it makes sense all of a sudden that none of it does, and for a moment Johnny feels an ecstasy and a white-hot blinding surge of righteousness that sees him reaching across the table for a crusty metal fork left over from Shiner’s plate of Ches’s that he didnt even bother to offer Johnny a fucken chip from."

4) "A plaid, greying man in his late forties holds open the door to the coffee shop for his perky teenage daughter and when she passes through the doorway Johnny hears her say Well then, if not there Daddy, how about my bellybutton? Just fucken kill me. Or give me something innocent to destroy. Johnny eyes the brick wall again, gives his cheek a little squeeze, realizes the skin on his face is as numb and dead and useless as his legs, realizes he’s well stoned out of his gourd, and feels better straight away."

5) "Next thing the pigs are gonna be swingin by lookin for some ID. RCMP too, out this way. Whole different kinda bastard. Not that Johnny’s got nothing to worry about. There’s the record, yes, but nothing outstanding, no conditions no more. Nothing no one can say. Travelling. Here’s my dead girlfriend’s ashes, right here. Yes sir officer, gonna scatter em into that other ocean, on the other side."

6) "Johnny feels the gin do that nauseous churning devil’s dance as it passes his stomach and scurries on into his parched veins, down to his smouldering shins and feet, waits for it to hit his battered brain, only to realize it likely hit there before he even had the bottle to his lips."

7) "What do I remember? This is what they wants to know. Tell us what you can remember . . . Since when? Since that lanky Reeves fucker? Caul’s? The hoof of a moose? Since fucken Kingston?

I dont.

I do.

Remember.

Too fucken much I remembers. That look she gave me, headed up over the hill with the blood spilling down her forehead. Madonna. Youre so fucked Johnny. Yeah I know girl, I knows that. Aint we all? And I knows that no matter what went down or how it happened, what kind of spin you put on it all, you just needed a way out. Cause where was any of it going? Feeding off each other’s misery. I knows what that look meant. It meant Goodbye Johnny, this is my ticket out. And I cant hardly blame you. We’re all lookin for a change of scenery, at the very least. We’re all lookin for our ticket. Who’s not lookin to claw their way out from under what they’re tangled up in? Who’s not, underneath it all, desperate to let go of what they’re hangin on to? And what’s really worth hanging on to anymore? Fuck you, that’s all I have to say."

1) "«Mr. J. R. Starr, ingénieur,

«30, Canongate.

«Edimbourg

«Si monsieur James Starr veut se rendre demain aux houillères d'Aberfoyle, fosse Dochart, puits Yarow, il lui sera fait une communication de nature à l'intéresser.

«Monsieur James Starr sera attendu, toute la journée, à la gare de Callander, par Harry Ford, fils de l'ancien overman Simon Ford.

«Il est prié de tenir cette invitation secrète.»"

2) "L'ingénieur regardait donc autour de lui d'un œil attristé. Il s'arrêtait par instants pour reprendre haleine. Il écoutait. L'air ne s'emplissait plus à présent des sifflements lointains et du fracas haletant des machines. A l'horizon, pas une de ces vapeurs noirâtres, que l'industriel aime à retrouver, mêlées aux grands nuages. Nulle haute cheminée cylindrique ou prismatique vomissant des fumées, après s'être alimentée au gisement même, nul tuyau d'échappement s'époumonant à souffler sa vapeur blanche. Le sol, autrefois sali par la poussière de la houille, avait un aspect propre, auquel les yeux de James Starr n'étaient plus habitués.

Lorsque l'ingénieur s'arrêtait, Harry Ford s'arrêtait aussi. Le jeune mineur attendait en silence. Il sentait bien ce qui se passait dans l'esprit de son compagnon, et il partageait vivement cette impression,—lui, un enfant de la houillère, dont toute la vie s'était écoulée dans les profondeurs de ce sol."

3) "Si, par quelque puissance surhumaine, des ingénieurs eussent pu enlever d'un bloc et sur une épaisseur de mille pieds toute cette portion de la croûte terrestre qui supporte cet ensemble de lacs, de fleuves, de golfes et les territoires riverains des comtés de Stirling, de Dumbarton et de Renfrew, ils auraient trouvé, sous cet énorme couvercle, une excavation immense, et telle qu'il n'en existait qu'une autre au monde qui pût lui être comparée,—la célèbre grotte de Mammouth, dans le Kentucky."

4) "Quoi qu'il en soit, il y avait là, dans le sous-sol écossais, une sorte de comté souterrain, auquel il ne manquait, pour être habitable, que les rayons du soleil, ou, à son défaut, la clarté d'un astre spécial.

L'eau y était localisée dans certaines dépressions, formant de vastes étangs, ou même des lacs plus grands que le lac Katrine, situé précisément au-dessus. Sans doute, ces lacs n'avaient pas le mouvement des eaux, les courants, le ressac. Ils ne reflétaient pas la silhouette de quelque vieux château gothique. Ni les bouleaux ni les chênes ne se penchaient sur leurs rives, les montagnes n'allongeaient pas de grandes ombres à leur surface, les steamboats ne les sillonnaient pas, aucune lumière ne se réverbérait dans leurs eaux, le soleil ne les imprégnait pas de ses rayons éclatants, la lune ne se levait jamais sur leur horizon. Et pourtant, ces lacs profonds, dont la brise ne ridait pas le miroir, n'auraient pas été sans charme, à la lumière de quelque astre électrique, et, réunis par un lacet de canaux, ils complétaient bien la géographie de cet étrange domaine."

5) "Nell ne pouvait parler. Ses lèvres ne murmuraient que des mots vagues. Ses bras frémissaient. Sa tête était prise de vertiges. Un instant, ses forces l'abandonnèrent. Dans cet air si pur, devant ce spectacle sublime, elle se sentit tout à coup faiblir, et tomba sans connaissance dans les bras d'Harry, prêts à la recevoir.

Cette jeune fille, dont la vie s'était écoulée jusqu'alors dans les entrailles du massif terrestre, avait enfin contemplé ce qui constitue presque tout l'univers, tel que l'ont fait le Créateur et l'homme. Ses regards, après avoir plané sur la ville et sur la campagne, venaient de s'étendre, pour la première fois, sur l'immensité de la mer et l'infini du ciel."

1) "Imagine a beam of light shooting out of my heart but instead of going into you it wanders into the center of the universe, which is you standing in the sparkly white grass inside my wilderness. We make our way together toward the incredible bright light. Light takes 1.255 seconds to get from the earth to the moon. We kiss for a long time."

2) "Your eyes are beds of moss And your tongue is a pine tree And my mouth is the sky Our bodies are gardens The golden gradient A tingling in my spine A stem A spiral"

3) "I've written nothing of substance of you I was too happy This is my consolation"

4) "You take the lightness out of me You put me back in the dark Like the way motion cuts the calm Smoke on the facets"

5) "People just want to hold Without being held And vice versa"

6) "Water has a way of finding the beach"

1) "I had started 'hibernating' as best I could in mid-June of 2000. I was twenty-four years old. I watched summer die and autumn turn cold and gray through a broken slat in the blinds. My muscles withered. The sheets on my bed yellowed, although I usually fell asleep in front of the television on the sofa, which was from Pottery Barn and striped blue and white and sagging and covered in coffee and sweat stains.

I didn't do much in my waking hours besides watch movies. I couldn't stand to watch regular television. Especially at the beginning, TV aroused too much in me, and I'd get compulsive about the remote, clicking around, scoffing at everything and agitating myself. I couldn't handle it. The only news I could read were the sensational headlines on the local daily papers at the bodega. I'd quickly glance at them as I paid for my coffees. Bush versus Gore for president. Somebody important died, a child was kidnapped, a senator stole money, a famous athlete cheated on his pregnant wife. Things were happening in New York City–they always are–but none of it affected me. This was the beauty of sleep–reality detached itself and appeared in my mind as casually as a movie or a dream. It was easy to ignore things that didn't concern me. Subway workers went on strike. A hurricane came and went. It didn't matter. Extraterrestrials could have invaded, locusts could have swarmed, and I would have noted it, but I wouldn't have worried."

2) "'You really shouldn't mix alcohol with all your medications,' she said, finishing the wine. I let Reva have all the wine. In college, she'd called hitting the bars 'going to therapy.' She could suck a whiskey sour down in one sip. She popped Advil between drinks. She said it kept her tolerance up. She would probably qualify as an alcoholic. But she was right about me. I was 'on drugs.' I took upwards of a dozen pills a day. But it was all very regulated, I thought. It was all totally aboveboard. I just wanted to sleep all the time. I had a plan. 'I'm not a junkie or something,' I said defensively. 'I'm taking some time off. This is my year of rest and relaxation.'"

3) "At work, I took hour-long naps in the supply closet under the stairs during my lunch breaks. 'Napping' is such a childish word, but that was what I was doing. The tonality of my night sleep was more variable, generally unpredictable, but every time I lay down in that supply closet I went straight into black emptiness, an infinite space of nothingness. I was neither scared nor elated in that space. I had no visions. I had no ideas. If I had a distinct thought, I would hear it, and the sound of it would echo and echo until it got absorbed by the darkness and disappeared. There was no response necessary. No inane conversation with myself. It was peaceful. A vent in the closet released a steady flow of fresh air that picked up the scent of laundry from the hotel next door. There was no work to do, nothing I had to counteract or compensate for because there was nothing at all, period. And yet I was aware of the nothingness. I was awake in the sleep, somehow. I felt good. Almost happy."

4) "'Oxytocin is a hormone released during copulation,' my father went on, staring at the blank wall behind me.

“Orgasm,' my mother whispered.

'Biologically, oxytocin serves a purpose,' my father said.

'That warm fuzzy feeling.'

'It's what bonds a couple together. Without it, the human species would have gone extinct a long time ago. Women experience its effects more powerfully than men do. It's good to be aware of that.'

'For when you're thrown out with yesterday's trash,' my mother said. 'Men are dogs. Even professors, so don't be fooled.'

'Men don't attach as easily. They're more rational,' my father corrected her. After a long pause, he said, 'We just want you to be careful.'

'He means use a rubber.'

'And take these.'

My father gave me a small, pink, shell-shaped compact of birth control pills.

'Gross,' was all I could say.

'And your father has cancer,' my mother said.

I said nothing.

'Prostate isn't like breast,' my father said, turning away. 'They do surgery, and you move on.'

'The man always dies first,' my mother whispered.

My dad's chair screeched on the floor as he pushed himself away from the table."

5) "It had been months since I'd even thought of Ping Xi. Whenever Ducat had popped into my mind, I'd tried to winnow my focus down to the simple memory of the long walk to the Eighty-sixth Street subway station, the express train to Union Square, the L train across town, the walk up Eighth Avenue and left on Twenty-third Street, the hobble over the old cobblestones in my high heels. Remembering the geography of Manhattan seemed worth hanging on to. But I would have preferred to forget the names and details of the people I'd met in Chelsea. The art world had turned out to be like the stock market, a reflection of political trends and the persuasions of capitalism, fueled by greed and gossip and cocaine. I might as well have worked on Wall Street. Speculation and opinions drove not only the market but the products, sadly, the values of which were hinged not to the ineffable quality of art as a sacred human ritual–a value impossible to measure, anyway–but to what a bunch of rich assholes thought would 'elevate' their portfolios and inspire jealousy and, delusional as they all were, respect. I was perfectly happy to wipe out all that garbage from my mind."

6) "I got the feeling that if I moved the frames to the side, I'd see the artists watching me, as though through a two-way mirror, cracking their arthritic knuckles and rubbing their stubbled chins, wondering what I was wondering about them, if I saw their brilliance, or if their lives had been pointless, if only God could judge them after all. Did they want more? Was there more genius to be wrung out of the turpentine rags at their feet? Could they have painted better? Could they have painted more generously? More clearly? Could they have dropped more fruit from their windows? Did they know that glory was mundane? Did they wish they'd crushed those withered grapes between their fingers and spent their days walking through fields of grass or being in love or confessing their delusions to a priest or starving like the hungry souls they were, begging for alms in the city square with some honesty for once? Maybe they'd lived wrongly. Their greatness might have poisoned them. Did they wonder about things like that? Maybe they couldn't sleep at night. Were they plagued by nightmares? Maybe they understood, in fact, that beauty and meaning had nothing to do with one another. Maybe they lived as real artists knowing all along that there were no pearly gates. Neither creation nor sacrifice could lead a person to heaven. Or maybe not. Maybe, in the morning, they were aloof and happy to distract themselves with their brushes and oils, to mix their colors and smoke their pipes and go back to their fresh still lifes without having to swat away any more flies."

1) [Albert Rosenfield, on Leo Johnson] "My own interaction with this knuckle-dragger was fleeting, but he left a vivid impression, not unlike the livid marks on his soon-to-be ex-wife’s neck after he nearly strangled her. His entire life span could easily be written off as a scathing indictment of our public education system, but to be fair, you’d probably have to go all the way back to the crossroads where Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal went their separate ways and say: Leo’s forbears took the path less traveled.

So, for starters: It wasn’t the spiders that killed him. Whatever 'evil genius'–I’m looking at you, Windom Earle–decided to hoist a bag of tarantulas over his head as a dire threat to Leo’s health obviously wasted far too much time watching cheesy Vincent Price movies and not nearly enough studying arachnids. Tarantulas aren’t ever fatally venomous, dipshit; they just look scary.

[...] The world is changing pronto, Chief, and now that these salt-of-the-earth “country volk” realize they’ve been left behind, it’s going to be sheer hell playing catch-up. (I know, I know, I’m a raging asshole.)

And speaking of entrepreneurial initiative, here’s a no-brainer: Why don’t some of these enterprising yokels kick-start a craft brewery here in town? They’d instantly attract an endless stream of thirsty proles, and the only competition is swill.

Enough community building for one night. To sum up: Leo Johnson’s dead. Having a hard time arguing that the local landscape isn’t trending upward because of it."

2) "The level of Cooper’s suffering and remorse in the terrible aftermath of these tragic events can’t be underestimated. He fiercely committed himself to counseling and self-reflection during his physical recovery in a way that was 100 percent sincere. He’s on record—well, tape, anyway—confirming that this experience represented the most difficult lesson of his life, and, admirably, he took it to heart. But that’s not quite the same thing as entirely purging an ingrained impulse to save a troubled woman from herself, is it, Chief? (Am I being too harsh on Agent Cooper here? I’m open to suggestions, so please let me know if you feel that’s the case. Notwithstanding its importance, I believe Cooper’s obsession with the Laura Palmer case harbors echoes of this tendency.)"

3) "James had edged past thirty, and at this point the bloom faded permanently from his Kerouac romance with the road. Once his leg healed up, he went back to work for Ed at the Gas Farm, and a few years later he took a second job working night security at the Great Northern. He lives alone, modestly, drives a used Ford Focus now, still plays guitar, writes plaintive, simple, and appealing songs—unrequited love, heartbreak, and so on—that he sometimes performs locally, and as far as I can tell has never hurt another human being."

4) [Margaret Lanterman, read aloud at her funeral] "Every meeting between friends must end with a parting, and so, my friends, today we take our leave. This is life. None of us profits from ignoring or hiding from the facts, so why should we bother? Life is what it is, a gift that is given to us for a time—like a library book—that must eventually be returned. How should we treat this book? If we are able to remember that it is not ours to begin with—one that we’re entrusted with, to care for, to study and learn from—perhaps it would change the way we treat it while it’s in our possession. How do you treat a precious gift from a dear friend? This is a good question to ask, and today is a good time to ask it.

Such busy, busy minds we have. Have you noticed? We think and we think until we twist ourselves into the ground like a flathead screw. My log has this to say: The answers to all our questions are in the wind and the trees, the rocks and the water.

No one is helpless. No one is beyond helping. It is good to seek out those who need us and do what we can for them. I recommend that. There is nothing that can’t be done if we set our minds to doing it. Don’t be sad. Be happy you have another day to do what needs doing. We only have so many of them.

We are born into this world, not another one. It’s not perfect, but it is what it is. This world presents some simple, certain truths. It helps us grow if we accept them, but many of these truths seem to trouble or frighten us. For instance, there is no light without darkness—and this troubles many of us—but without it, how else would we tell one from the other? We spend half of every day in darkness; surely we should make our peace with this. You may decide to see this as a metaphor. Many people do. I see it as a fact. Metaphors are beautiful ways of speaking about the truth. So are facts. Both tell us that time—and light, and darkness—moves in cycles. We move through them, too, often as passengers, but if our eyes are open, there is much to be learned along the way. A traveler learns more than a passenger. When darkness comes, a traveler learns to be brave, for they know the light will return. Anyone who’s spent a night alone in the woods learns this. When a dark age comes, hold the light inside. That’s where it lives anyway. There are forces of darkness—and beings of darkness—and they are real and have always been around us. They’re part of the dance, just as you and I are; they’re just listening to different music. This may be the most troubling truth we will ever know. Many of us live most of our lives and brush up against this reality only rarely. It is far from pleasant, but wishing it were otherwise will not make it so.

So may I offer a suggestion: When a dark age comes, just as you would at night, hold the light inside you. Others, I can tell you, have already learned to do the same. In time, you will learn to recognize the light, in yourself and others. In this way you will find each other. Together, you will make the light stronger.

This truth I know as sure as the dawn: Darkness will always yield to light, when the light is strong."

5) "I’m on the plane now, in the air, forty minutes east of Spokane. The uncanny penumbra I reported hasn’t left me—I barely slept—but it’s fading as I travel farther east. I don’t know what to make of it. You wanted to know what happened there in that town and region, to these people you knew, whom I feel I’ve come to know now as well. They meant something to you for a reason, I think, beyond just your knowing them, beyond that they were good or interesting people in their own right: because it was all there, in that one town. All of life, cradle to grave, every shade and color of the spectrum, like a fractal, itself made up of infinite parts. The ocean in a drop of water."

1) "Margery Brunham, or Burnham, was born about 1373 in Bishop's Lynn, as King's Lynn was then called, in Norfolk. When an old woman, she dictated the memoirs on which this book is based. Her autobiography is remarkable in many ways. It is the first to be written in English. Though she wished to depict herself as, above all, a saintly woman on familiar terms with God, many of the conversations with friends and enemies are recorded in a thoroughly down to earth spirit. These are real people speaking to a real woman. They say the kind of things anyone would in similar circumstances. They are bored by continual piety. In some cases, they laugh scornfully at religious excesses. In others, they become suspicious and denounce the writer to the authorities as a detestable heretic. Yet others were fully convinced of her sanctity, declaring that a place was reserved for her in heaven. There were also those who believed in spite of themselves: if in trouble, they desired her prayers; if not, they avoided her. They may not have used the very words reported, but one can't help feeling the sense is true enough."

2) "A young monk stepped forward, taking his tone from the other, and said: 'Eythyr thow hast the Holy Gost or ...a devyl wythin the, for that thu spekyst her to us, it is Holy Wrytte." Still not realizing the danger, Margery retorted: 'I pray you ser, geve me leve to tellyn yow a tale.' The monks seem to have hesitated to prolong the scene, for the crowd which had collected cried: 'Late hir sey what sche wyl.' This was the sort of invitation Margery never could resist. She addressed the audience in a parable of her own composition about a man who, as a penance for his sins, paid others to abuse him and was always very glad to meet disagreeable people, because it enabled him to get through a part of his punishment free of charge. In her own case, she thanked them for the disgraceful treatment she had received, since the more she suffered for the love of God, the sooner she'd go to heaven. This tactless oration can scarcely have conciliated the monks; and to the congregation it proved her a heretic. As she marched out of the church they followed, shouting: 'Thow shalt be brent fals lollare. Her is a cartful of thornys redy for the and a tonne to bren the wyth.'"

3) [Aboard ship] "After eating, one might doze for a time, being careful to secure one's money to one's person; it was unsafe to lay down even a pen on board ship, if one hoped to see it again. There were days when everyone seemed to be in a happy dream and an almost celestial harmony to descend on the decks. On other days, tempers were lost on the smallest provocation, knives snatched up and damage done. The crew did not intervene in really fierce fights. It was not wise to do so. Never make enemies at sea, advise experienced travellers, the memory of these fatal disputes before them as they write. Never occupy another man's place unless he has expressly allowed it, or you will be taken for a thief and dealt with accordingly. Make yourself agreeable even to slaves, for you can't tell when you may have need of help. The prudent man, who hopes to survive the perils of the sea, is always watchful, not sitting down anywhere without first testing for soft pitch, keeping away from ropes, above all, not fancying his skill as a sailor and offering to help during storms. On the other hand one should be manly and not spend one's days miserably taking every medicine recommended by the doctors and poking suspiciously at food in the fear of being poisoned. Moderation and tact are the supreme virtues in these circumstances. One wonders that Margery came through alive."

4) "After they had gone too far to put back into port, suddenly 'it began waxin gret tempestys and dyrke wedyr'. The bark wallowed alarmingly. The passengers thought they would surely sink. 'Than thei cryed to God', repeating the most efficacious prayers they knew. Luckily, it was only the tail end of the last week's storms and did not last long: 'anon the tempestys sesyd and thei had fayr wedyr' for the rest of the crossing. The next day, in the evening 'thei cam to londe' in East Anglia. Now a great feeling of relief and joy overcame her. How many times in the past year had it seemed likely that she would not reach home again? She might have died in the Alps with William Weaver; or in Venice where she was so ill and her maid refused to nurse her; or in the Holy Land of exhaustion and fever; or on the Italian roads from attack by bandits; or in Rome of starvation. All these dangers she had triumphantly passed, for her courage had never failed. She 'fel downe on hir knes kyssyng the grownde'."

5) "'And so (they) went hom togedyr to Lynne', Margery, we must presume, talking at a great rate of the wonders she had seen; of the fire of love and celestial music; of life on shipboard; of vendetta; of how she had always got the better of everyone in the end. She must have asked him [husband John Kempe] to give an account of himself, particularly in regard to his religious observances. His replies were, evidently, not sufficiently interesting to remain in her memory. We only know, from subsequent events, that he had still not been successful in business. As Margery had spent her inheritance, they were very poor. In spite of this, and the vow of celebacy, they remained on good terms. Once, they had been deeply and satisfyingly in love and the bond was never entirely broken."

6) "Perhaps her philosophy could even have embraced her book's curious posthumous adventures. Evidently quite popular, it was copied, it may be more than once. In the early sixteenth century short extracts were printed as a pamphlet. These, by their selection and owing to their being given out of context, lent a spurious air of wisdom and holiness to Margery's thought. All self-esteem, all excess, were removed by the editor with remarkable effect. These seemed to be the broodings of a holy anchoress. At some later date, the original manuscript, no longer read or consulted, disappeared. For hundreds of years it lay forgotten in one library or another. The holy anchoress, Margery Kempe, passed into oblivion until 1934, when she was suddenly discovered in a country house in Yorkshire. There was great excitement: a major writer of the fifteenth century had been found. There was equal disappointment: she was not a saint after all, nothing like one. But many saints have written books, whereas only one member of the medieval public has had the industry, self-confidence and will-power to describe for us the everyday life and vicissitudes of a mayor's extraordinary daughter. [...] Though shrewd enough in other matters and penetrating in her judgements, about her connection with the divine she remained obdurate. She knew how to be tactful. She was alert, intelligent and a woman of the world in many respects. But when the religious mood came on her, she lost all control and could not be persuaded by any number of dangerous misadventures that some, at least, of her critics might be justified. Her story thus descends from the heights on which she intended it to rest and becomes the tale of a woman we can understand and with whom we can sympathize across the gap of five hundred years."

[cw spoilers, language, sui]

1) "A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.

It is too late. The Evacuation still proceeds, but it's all theatre. There are no lights inside the cars. No light anywhere. Above him lift girders old as an iron queen, and glass somewhere far above that would let the light of day through. But it's night. He's afraid of the way the glass will fall—soon—it will be a spectacle: the fall of a crystal palace. But coming down in total blackout, without one glint of light, only great invisible crashing."

2) " [...] Lord Blatherard Osmo was able at last to devote all of his time to Novi Pazar. Early in 1939, he was discovered mysteriously suffocated in a bathtub full of tapioca pudding, at the home of a Certain Viscountess. Some have seen in this the hand of the Firm. Months passed, World War II started, years passed, nothing was heard from Novi Pazar. Pirate Prentice had saved Europe from the Balkan Armageddon the old men dreamed of, giddy in their beds with its grandeur—though not from World War II, of course. But by then, the Firm was allowing Pirate only tiny homeopathic doses of peace, just enough to keep his defenses up, but not enough for it to poison him."

3) "She's worth nothing to them now. They were after Schußstelle 3. She gave them everything else, but kept finding reasons not to pinpoint the Captain's rocket site, and there is too much doubt by now as to how good the reasons were. True, the site was often moved about. But she could've been placed no closer to the decision-making: it was her own expressionless servant's face that leaned in over their schnapps and cigars, the charts coffee-ringed across the low tables, the cream papers stamped purple as bruised flesh. Wim and the others have invested time and lives—three Jewish families sent east—though wait now, she's more than balanced it, hasn't she, in the months out at Scheveningen? They were kids, neurotic, lonely, pilots and crews they all loved to talk, and she's fed back who knows how many reams' worth of Most Secret flimsies across the North Sea, hasn't she, squadron numbers, fueling stops, spin-recovery techniques and turning radii, power settings, radio channels, sectors, traffic patterns hasn't she? What more do they want? She asks this seriously, as if there's a real conversion factor between information and lives. Well, strange to say, there is. Written down in the Manual, on file at the War Department. Don't forget the real business of the War is buying and selling. The murdering and the violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals. The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways. It serves as spectacle, as diversion from the real movements of the War. It provides raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world. Best of all, mass death's a stimulus to just ordinary folks, little fellows, to try 'n' grab a piece of that Pie while they're still here to gobble it up. The true war is a celebration of markets. Organic markets, carefully styled 'black' by the professionals, spring up everywhere. Scrip, Sterling, Reichsmarks continue to move, severe as classical ballet, inside their antiseptic marble chambers. But out here, down here among the people, the truer currencies come into being. So, Jews are negotiable. Every bit as negotiable as cigarettes, cunt, or Hershey bars."

4) "'You were in London,' she will presently whisper, turning back to her wheel and spinning it again, face averted, womanly twisting the night-streaked yarn of her past, 'while they were coming down. I was in 's Gravenhage'—fricatives sighing, the name spoken with exile's lingering—'while they were going up. Between you and me is not only a rocket trajectory, but also a life. You will come to understand that between the two points, in the five minutes, it lives an entire life. You haven't even learned the data on our side of the flight profile, the visible or trackable. Beyond them there's so much more, so much none of us know....'

But it is a curve each of them feels, unmistakably. It is the parabola. They must have guessed, once or twice—guessed and refused to believe—that everything, always, collectively, had been moving toward that purified shape latent in the sky, that shape of no surprise, no second chances, no return. Yet they do move forever under it, reserved for its own black-and-white bad news certainly as if it were the Rainbow, and they its children..."

5) "She has moved away, releasing his cock into the cold room. 'What's it like in London, Slothrop? When the rockets come down?'

'What?' After fucking he usually likes to lie around, just smoke a cigarette, think about food, 'Uh, you don't know it's there till it's there. Gee, till after it's there. If it doesn't hit you, then you're O.K. till the next one. If you hear the explosion, you know you must be alive.'

'That's how you know you're alive.'

'Right.' She sits up, pulling underpants back up and skirt back down, goes to the mirror, starts rearranging her hair. 'Let's hear the boundary-layer temperatures. While you're getting dressed.'"

6) "Just for the knife-edge, here in the Rue Rossini, there comes to Slothrop the best feeling dusk in a foreign city can bring: just where the sky's light balances the electric lamplight in the street, just before the first star, some promise of events without cause, surprises, a direction at right angles to every direction his life has been able to find up till now."

7) "We are safely past the days of the Eis-Heiligen-St. Pancratius, St. Servatius, St. Bonifacius, die kalte Sophie... they hover in clouds above the vineyards, holy beings of ice, ready with a breath, an intention, to ruin the year with frost and cold. In certain years, especially War years, they are short on charity, peevish, smug in their power: not quite saintly or even Christian. The prayers of growers, pickers and wine enthusiasts must reach them, but there's no telling how the ice-saints feel—coarse laughter, pagan annoyance, who understands this rear-guard who preserve winter against the revolutionaries of May?

They found the countryside, this year, at peace by a scant few days. Already vines are beginning to grow back over dragon's teeth, fallen Stukas, burned tanks. The sun warms the hillsides, the rivers fall bright as wine. The saints have refrained. Nights have been mild. The frost didn't come. It is the spring of peace. The vintage, God granting at least a hundred days of sun, will be fine."

8) "'So Marvy was right. They didn't disarm you guys.'

'They didn't know where to find us. We were a surprise. There are even now powerful factions in Paris who don't believe we exist. And most of the time I'm not so sure myself.'

'How's that?'

'Well, I think we're here, but only in a statistical way. Something like that rock over there is just about 100% certain—it knows it's there, so does everybody else. But our own chances of being right here right now are only a little better than even—the slightest shift in the probabilities and we're gone—schnapp! like that."

'Peculiar talk, Oberst.'"

9) "Kekulé dreams the Great Serpent holding its own tail in its mouth, the dreaming Serpent which surrounds the World. But the meanness, the cynicism with which this dream is to be used. The Serpent that announces, 'The World is a closed thing, cyclical, resonant, eternally-returning,' is to be delivered into a system whose only aim is to violate the Cycle. Taking and not giving back, demanding that 'productivity' and 'earnings' keep on increasing with time, the System removing from the rest of the World these vast quantities of energy to keep its own tiny desperate fraction showing a profit: and not only most of humanity—most of the World, animal, vegetable and mineral, is laid waste in the process. The System may or may not understand that it's only buying time. And that time is an artificial resource to begin with, of no value to anyone or anything but the System, which sooner or later must crash to its death, when its addiction to energy has become more than the rest of the World can supply, dragging with it innocent souls all along the chain of life. Living inside the System is like riding across the country in a bus driven by a maniac bent on suicide..."

10) "Gomera was the last piece of land Columbus touched before America. Did he hear them too, that last night? Did they have a message for him? A warning? Could he understand the prescient goatherds in the dark, up in the Canarian holly and the faya, gone dead green in the last sunset of Europe?"

11) "You will want cause and effect. All right."

12) "It all poises here. Passageways of routine, still cogent enough, still herding us through time... the iron rockets waiting outside... the birth-scream of the latest spring torn across rainy miles of Saxony, route-sides littered with last envelopes, stripped gears, seized bearings, rotted socks and skivvies fragrant now with fungus and mud. If there is still hope for Gottfried here in this wind-beat moment, then there is hope elsewhere. The scene itself must be read as a card: what is to come. Whatever has happened since to the figures in it (roughly drawn in soiled white, army gray, spare as a sketch on a ruined wall) it is preserved, though it has no name, and, like The Fool, no agreed assignment in the deck."

13) "The black faces pass by, mba-kayere, some glancing at him curiously, others too involved with their own exhaustion, or with keeping a tight guard on a covered wagon containing the warhead section of the 00001. Enzian on his motorcycle stops for a moment, mba-kayere, to talk to the scarred, unshaven white. They're in the middle of the bridge. They talk broken German. Tchitcherine manages to hustle half a pack of American cigarettes and three raw potatoes. The two men nod, not quite formally, not quite smiling, Enzian puts his bike in gear and returns to his journey. Tchitcherine lights a cigarette, watching them down the road, shivering in the dusk. Then he goes back to his young girl beside the stream. They will have to locate some firewood before all the light is gone.

This is magic. Sure—but not necessarily fantasy. Certainly not the first time a man has passed his brother by, at the edge of the evening, often forever, without knowing it."

[cw spoilers]

1) "As you curve back around, the lighthouse fast approaches. The air trembles as it pushes out from both sides of the lighthouse and then re-forms, ever questing, forever sampling, rising high only to come low yet again, and finally circling like a question mark so you can bear witness to your own immolation: a shape huddled there, leaking light. What a sad figure, sleeping there, dissolving there. A green flame, a distress signal, an opportunity. Are you still soaring? Are you still dying or dead? You can’t tell anymore."

2) "Bodies could be beacons, too, Saul knew. A lighthouse was a fixed beacon for a fixed purpose; a person was a moving one. But people still emanated light in their way, still shone across the miles as a warning, an invitation, or even just a static signal. People opened up so they became a brightness, or they went dark. They turned their light inward sometimes, so you couldn’t see it, because they had no other choice."

3) "Sitting there at the Star Lanes Lounge, scribbling, you found the cottage coming back to you at odd moments, along with the lighthouse. Always that riptide compulsion dragging you down into the water, that need to know overriding the fear. The sound of the midnight waves at high tide, how from the window of your room in your mother’s bungalow back then you could see the surf under the moonlight as a series of metallic-blue lines, dark water squeezed between them. Sometimes those lines had been broken by her figure as she walked the beach late at night, kept awake by thoughts she never shared, her face turned away from you. As if searching even then for the answer you seek now."

4) "Even as he knew the words came from him, had always come from him, and were being emitted soundlessly from his mouth. And that he had been speaking already for a very long time, and that each word had been unraveling his brain a little more, a little more, even as each word also offered relief from the pressure in his skull. While what lay below waited for his mind to peel away entirely. A blinding white light, a plant with leaves that formed a rough circle, a splinter that was not a splinter.

When he woke up, he was sitting in a chair outside the lighthouse, with no idea how he’d gotten there. The words still lived inside of him, a sermon now coming out whether he wanted it to or not. Whether it would destroy him or not. Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead to share with the worms."

5) "Membranes and dimensions. Limitless amounts of space. Limitless amounts of energy. Effortless manipulation of molecules. Continual attempts to transform the human into the non-human. The ability to move an entire biosphere to another place. Right now, if the outside world existed, it would still be sending radio-wave messages into space and monitoring radio-wave frequencies to seek out other intelligent life in the universe. But Ghost Bird didn’t think those messages were being received. Another way people were bound by their own view of consciousness. What if an infection was a message, a brightness a kind of symphony? As a defense? An odd form of communication? If so, the message had not been received, would probably never be received, the message buried in the transformation itself. Having to reach for such banal answers because of a lack of imagination, because human beings couldn’t even put themselves in the mind of a cormorant or an owl or a whale or a bumblebee. Did she want to ally herself to such a lack, and did she have a choice?"

6) "Perhaps the biologist’s final response was the only response that mattered, and her entire letter a sop to expectations, to the reaction human beings were hardwired to have. A kind of final delay before she had come to embody that correct answer? Perhaps so many journals had piled up in the lighthouse because on some level most came, in time, to recognize the futility of language. Not just in Area X but against the rightness of the lived-in moment, the instant of touch, of connection, for which words were such a sorrowful disappointment, so inadequate an expression of both the finite and the infinite. Even as the Crawler wrote out its terrible message."

7) "Whatever occurred back then, I know you tried your best, because you always did try your best. And I am trying my best, too. Even if we don’t always know what that means or how it will play out. You can get caught up in something that’s beyond you, and never understand why. The world we are a part of now is difficult to accept, unimaginably difficult. I don’t know if I accept everything even now. I don’t know how I can. But acceptance moves past denial, and maybe there’s defiance in that, too. I remember you, Saul. I remember the keeper of the light. I never did forget about you; I just took a long time coming back."

1) "Objectively, there's only one good movie, and it's The Fugitive. The Fugitive is the only good movie. Now, if you think I'm being capricious, know that I have had this feeling before about other things—I remember when I first read Island of the Blue Dolphins, I was like, 'Shut it down, no need to write more books,' ditto with 'The Sign' by Ace of Base—but those feelings didn't last, because eventually I heard 'Poison' by Bell Biv DeVoe and read a little story you might have heard of called THE BIBLE? But when it comes to The Fugitive, I have never wavered. The Fugitive is the only good movie. We didn't need any more movies after The Fugitive. We didn't need any movies before it either. We should erase those."

2) "The true work of love isn't staying together when things are perfect; it's staying together even when things are awful, weathering catastrophic mistakes (within reason) because, well, you decided to, and because you know the potential is as real as the now. It turns your partnership into something that grows instead of something that atrophies. You're promising another person not just passion and love but a safety net, some degree of stability and certainty in a fucking terrible world. You're saying, 'I promise I will stay with you even if you suck for a while,' an almost narcotic comfort that we all deserve. I don't dream of dying adorable; I dream of dying calloused and wise, of looking my husband in the eyes and saying, 'Remember that thing we almost didn't survive? Aren't you so glad we did?' At the same time, though. I cannot fucking imagine. The look. On my face. If my husband came to me and said... 'Honey...' 'Yeah?' 'Honey.' 'What is it?' 'Honey, I have something to tell you.' 'Just tell me!' 'Honey... I shrunk the kids.'"

3) "We're clearly supposed to resent Iceman for trying to stifle Maverick's unbelievably bitching bad-boy flying skills in the name of 'SAFETY' and 'REGARD FOR OTHERS' (boooooo!), but, you know what? I actually think being exceptional is bad. It's dangerous and unfriendly and it prevents us from building robust systems of aid and care. It precludes forethought and planning (oh, a hero will save us!), and it undercuts accountability when talented people do bad things (oh, but he's so special). My Norwegian mom always told me, 'You're not special—never think you're better than anybody else,' and I'm glad she did! Now I listen to other people and treat them with respect and wear a mask at the grocery store! Exceptionalism is a grift!"

4) "He [Zach Braff] and Portman go celebrate by sitting in the dry bathtub where his mom died, and he goes, 'When I'm with you, I feel so safe. Like I'm home.' OH, THANK GOODNESS. BY THE WAY, SHE HAS LITERALLY NOT ONCE SAID HOW SHE FEELS FOR THIS ENTIRE MOVIE. Then he goes to the airport and then he changes his mind and comes back from the airport because he realizes that without his presence she would simply wink out of existence because she is a fucking shell of a person, a marionette, an agency-free boner-golem."

5) "Does anyone else feel like everything was 1970 until 2008 and then it abruptly switched to 2015 until 2017 when it became 2020 and has been ever since?"

1) "What's the problem with being 'not racist'? It is a claim that signifies neutrality: 'I am not a racist, but neither am I aggressively against racism.' But there is no neutrality in the racism struggle. The opposite of 'racist' isn't 'not racist.' It is 'antiracist.' What's the difference? One endorses either the idea of a racial hierarchy as a racist, or racial equality as an antiracist. One either believes problems are rooted in groups of people, as a racist, or locates the roots of problems in power and policies, as an antiracist. One either allows racial inequities to persevere, as a racist, or confronts racial inequities, as an antiracist. There is no inbetween safe space of 'not racist.' The claim of 'not racist' neutrality is a mask for racism. This may seem harsh, but it's important at the outset that we apply one of the core principles of antiracism, which is to return the word 'racist' itself back to its proper usage. 'Racist' is not—as Richard Spencer argues—a pejorative. It is not the worst word in the English language; it is not the equivalent of a slur. It is descriptive, and the only way to undo racism is to consistently identify and describe it and then dismantle it. The attempt to turn this usefully descriptive term into an almost unusable slur is, of course, designed to do the opposite: to freeze us into inaction."

2) "We are surrounded by racial inequity, as visible as the law, as hidden as our private thoughts. The question for each of us is: What side of history will we stand on? A racist is someone who is supporting a racist policy by their actions or inaction or expressing a racist idea. An antiracist is someone who is supporting an antiracist policy by their actions or expressing an antiracist idea. 'Racist' and 'antiracist' are like peelable name tags that are placed and replaced based on what someone is doing or not doing, supporting or expressing in each moment. These are not permanent tattoos. No one becomes a racist or antiracist. We can only strive to be one or the other. We can unknowingly strive to be a racist. We can knowingly strive to be an antiracist. Like fighting an addiction, being an antiracist requires persistent self-awareness, constant self-criticism, and regular self-examination."

3) "Black individuals have, of course, suffered trauma from slavery and ongoing oppression. Some individuals throughout history have exhibited negative behaviors related to this trauma. DeGruy is a hero for ushering the constructs of trauma, damage, and healing into our understanding of Black life. But there is a thin line between an antiracist saying individual Blacks have suffered trauma and a racist saying Blacks are a traumatized people. There is similarly a thin line between an antiracist saying slavery was debilitating and a racist saying Blacks are a debilitated people. The latter constructions erase whole swaths of history: for instance, the story of even the first generation of emancipated Black people, who moved straight from plantations into the Union army, into politics, labor organizing, Union leagues, artistry, entrepreneurship, club building, church building, school building, community building—buildings more commonly razed by the fiery hand of racist terrorism than by any self-destructive hands of behavioral deficiencies derived from the trauma of slavery."

4) "We called our African American studies space a Black space—it was, after all, governed primarily by Black bodies, Black thoughts, Black cultures, and Black histories. Of course, the spaces at Temple University governed primarily by White bodies, White thoughts, White cultures, and White histories were not labeled White. They hid the Whiteness of their spaces behind the veil of color blindness."

5) "The original problem of racism has not been solved by suasion. Knowledge is only power if knowledge is put to the struggle for power. Changing minds is not a movement. Critiquing racism is not activism. Changing minds is not activism. An activist produces power and policy change, not mental change. If a person has no record of power or policy change, then that person is not an activist."

1) "[Chief Joseph] 'I have tried to save you from suffering and sorrow. We are few. They are many. You can see all we have at a glance. They have goods and ammunition in abundance. We must suffer great hardship and loss. 'I will go now to the place known to our ancestors, seldom visited, the place of smoke by the great falls and twin mountains, to seek the aid of the Great Spirit Chief in this time of need.' [The Archivist] 'This sounds like a reference to one of their principal myths, common to many nations in the Northwest region, that refer to ancient relationships with mysterious beings they refer to as 'Sky People.''"

2) "PRESIDENT NIXON: We're going to get to the bottom of this thing. You'll answer to me, once the shit hits the fan on Blue Book, and no one else. We're going to pull something together, below the radar, a private task force, interagency, to keep this going. ME [Douglas Milford]: What can I do? PRESIDENT NIXON: Lay low. Draw up a roster, who you might use, cherry pick from any branch of service or agency, and a plan on how you'd most effectively proceed--though whatever you do, keep the CIA out of it. They play their own game by their own rules no matter who's at this desk. Be ready when I call on you. I need to flex some muscle first, carve out some operating room--this is a power game; I know how the system works but it takes time--and then we're going to find out exactly what these Skull and Bones 'Wise Men' have stashed up their sleeves."

3) "[Dr. Jacoby] Leland spoke of 'possession.' Laura wrote in her diary about an entity she called 'BOB,' all caps. A malevolent being she claimed to 'see'—in her father's stead—whenever he assaulted her. Leland had no memory of his dreadful acts till the very end. A masking memory, for both of them, our 'professional training' would instruct me to label it, a way for their minds to protect themselves from the unendurable truth. Or, in other words, whistling through the graveyard. A medicine man in the Amazon would take them both at their word, believe the story at face value and treat it accordingly. Possession. An entity. Why is that any less plausible or relevant than the safe, sanitized, pre-packaged bullshit of an armchair diagnosis made solely from the neck up? What is that but a shield hoisted to protect us from the unholy terror of glimpsing ourselves as we truly are: creatures of unknown origin, trapped in time, pinned to a hostile rock whirling through indifferent and infinite space, clueless, inherently violent and condemned to death?"

4) "[Douglas Milford] These final truths you must never forget: we are utterly incapable of knowing their true intent, and their true intent may not be to wish us well. It may be that they're here to guide or even aid our evolution; it's equally possibly we may matter no more to them then those random protozoa in our tap water do to us. In other words, by our meager moral definitions, they may be both 'good' and 'evil,' and those precious distinctions of ours mean nothing to them. There may even be a 'good' and 'evil' side at play here, and we, our human race, is the game! Let me hasten to add I hope I'm wrong, that this work--being 'chosen'--has deranged me, but Garland, I fear that I am right and in my right mind. The owls may indeed not be what they seem but still serve an imperative function: they remind us to look into the darkness. Whatever steps you take from here, do not act alone: wait for your next control to appear."

1) "I first met Perkus Tooth in an office. Not an office where he worked, though I was confused about this at the time. (Which is itself hardly an uncommon situation, for me.)"

2) "Haven't you wondered why the average consumer is uncomfortable with letterboxed movies? It isn't because most people are programmed to be Philistines, though they are. Cable channels go on offering scan-and-pan versions to keep people from having to consider that frame's edge, which reminds them of all they're not seeing. That glimpse is intolerable. When your gaze slips beyond the edge of a book of magazine, you notice the ostensible texture of everyday reality, the table beneath the magazine, say, or the knee of your pants. When your eye slips past the limit of the letterboxed screen, you're faced with what's framed and projected in that margin—it ought to be something, but instead it's nothing, a terrifying murk, a zone of nullity. But the real reason it's so terrifying is because it begs the question of whether they're the same thing. Maybe the tabletop or the knee of your pants bears no more relation to the contents of the magazine than the images on the screen do to the void above and below."

3) "I find I want to get this description right, or at least a little righter. With the possible exception of my own face in the bathroom mirror, the church spire outside my window is the sole thing I look at deliberately, consciously, every single day. Yet I glance in its direction as if in doubt, as though the spire's memory is only a rumor between me and myself, and one of the two of us doesn't completely trust the other. When my eyes do confirm the church's actuality (buildings do persist, Manhattan does exist, things are relentlessly what they seem even if they serve as hosts, as homes, for other phenomena), the sight acts on my mind like an eraser rubbing away the words that might describe it, into crumbs easily swept from the page. If I'm elsewhere, I have an easy name for the thing: a church spire, a few blocks away, and, sporadically, a flock of wheeling birds. When I look, however, language dies."

4) "First we had to eat what now appeared, tongues of eggplant and bell pepper rolled into a juicy little vortex or eye at the center of a plate spattered with pesto, and then depart the table in the flurry as these dishes were cleared, following Russ Grinspoon, who'd ever-so-suavely placed his fishy hand on the bare shoulder of his rapt listener and asked her to excuse him, explaining that he'd promised to show me and Perkus a certain rare vase in Arnheim's collection. Out we went, incredibly, easily, through the maze of tables and up the mighty staircase, afraid to touch a polished banister too wide for mortal hands, on steps so plushed by carpet that our footfalls felt ungravitied, so that we might have been ghosts, or snowflakes, riding an updraft instead of settling to earth where we belonged. In a dim, swank study at the top of the stairs, walls lined with leather-bound sets, storm-giddy windows overlooking the top of the greenhouse roof and, within it, the dinner party we'd vacated, Grinspoon sparked a ready joint."

5) "Perkus lived as much inside a conundrum as he did a city. At any given moments the conundrum presented itself in some outward form, a vessel or symbol. Chase Insteadman might be the thing that had come along to replace chaldrons, which had themselves probably replaced some other emissary pregnant with undisclosed messages—Gnuppets, say, or Marlon Brando, Perkus couldn't always say which was the preeminent form conundrum took at a given time."

6) "'Something happened, Chase, there was some rupture in this city. Since then, time's been fragmented. Might have to do with the gray fog, that or some other disaster. Whatever the cause, ever since we've been living in a place that's a replica of itself, a fragile simulacrum, full of gaps and glitches. A theme park, really! Meant to halt time's encroachment. Of course such a thing is destined always to fail, time has a way of getting its bills paid. So these disjunctions appear, and we have to explain them away, as tigers or epic sculpture. If Noteless didn't exist the city would have had to invent him, Chase!' The more Perkus fleshed this theory the more the holes in his speech began to seem a kind of necessary reply to the temporal lacunae he felt the city had fallen into, as well as to Laird Noteless's bottomless pits and absent structures."

1) "The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The Black mother within each of us — the poet — whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free. Poetry coins the language to express and charter this revolutionary demand, the implementation of that freedom.

However, experience has taught us that action in the now is also necessary, always. Our children cannot dream unless they live, they cannot live unless they are nourished, and who else will feed them the real food without which their dreams will be no different from ours? 'If you want us to change the world someday, we at least have to live long enough to grow up!' shouts the child.

Sometimes we drug ourselves with dreams of new ideas. The head will save us. The brain alone will set us free. But there are no new ideas still waiting in the wings to save us as women, as human. There are only old and forgotten ones, new combinations, extrapolations and recognitions from within ourselves — along with the renewed courage to try them out. And we must constantly encourage ourselves and each other to attempt the heretical actions that our dreams imply, and so many of our old ideas disparage. In the forefront of our move toward change, there is only poetry to hint at possibility made real. Our poems formulate the implications of ourselves, what we feel within and dare make real (or bring action into accordance with), our fears, our hopes, our most cherished terrors.

For within living structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization, our feelings were not meant to survive. Kept around as unavoidable adjuncts or pleasant pastimes, feelings were expected to kneel to thought as women were expected to kneel to men. But women have survived. As poets. And there are no new pains. We have felt them all already. We have hidden that fact in the same place where we have hidden our power. They surface in our dreams, and it is our dreams that point the way to freedom. Those dreams are made realizable through our poems that give us the strength and courage to see, to feel, to speak, and to dare."



2) "This kind of action is a prevalent error among oppressed peoples. It is based upon the false notion that there is only a limited and particular amount of freedom that must be divided up between us, with the largest and juiciest pieces of liberty going as spoils to the victor or the stronger. So instead of joining together to fight for more, we quarrel between ourselves for a larger slice of the one pie. Black women fight between ourselves over men, instead of pursuing and using who we are and our strengths for lasting change; Black women and men fight between ourselves over who has more of a right to freedom, instead of seeing each other's struggles as part of our own and vital to our common goals; Black and white women fight between ourselves over who is the more oppressed, instead of seeing those areas in which our causes are the same. (Of course, this last separation is worsened by the intransigent racism that white women too often fail to, or cannot, address in themselves.)

At a recent Black literary conference, a heterosexual Black woman stated that to endorse lesbianism was to endorse the death of our race. This position reflects acute fright or a faulty reasoning, for once again it ascribes false power to difference. To the racist, Black people are so powerful that the presence of one can contaminate a whole lineage; to the heterosexist, lesbians are so powerful that the presence of one can contaminate the whole sex. This position supposes that if we do not eradicate lesbianism in the Black community, all Black women will become lesbians. It also supposes that lesbians do not have children. Both suppositions are patently false."



3) "For me, this task begins with teaching my son that I do not exist to do his feeling for him.

Men who are afraid to feel must keep women around to do their feeling for them while dismissing us for the same supposedly 'inferior' capacity to feel deeply. But in this way also, men deny themselves their own essential humanity, becoming trapped in dependency and fear.

As a Black woman committed to a liveable future, and as a mother loving and raising a boy who will become a man, I must examine all my possibilities of being within such a destructive system.

Jonathan was three-and-one-half when Frances, my lover, and I met; he was seven when we all began to live together permanently. From the start, Frances' and my insistence that there be no secrets in our household about the fact that we were lesbians has been the source of problems and strengths for both children. In the beginning, this insistence grew out of the knowledge, on both our parts, that whatever was hidden out of fear could always be used either against the children or ourselves – one imperfect but useful argument for honesty. The knowledge of fear can help make us free.

for the embattled

there is no place

that cannot be

home

nor is."



4) "Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society's definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference — those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older — know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those others identified as outside the structures in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master's house as their only source of support."



5) "Refusing to recognize difference makes it impossible to see the different problems and pitfalls facing us as women.

Thus, in a patriarchal power system where whiteskin privilege is a major prop, the entrapments used to neutralize Black women and white women are not the same. For example, it is easy for Black women to be used by the power structure against Black men, not because they are men, but because they are Black. Therefore, for Black women, it is necessary at all times to separate the needs of the oppressor from our own legitimate conflicts within our communities. This same problem does not exist for white women. Black women and men have shared racist oppression and still share it, although in different ways. Out of that shared oppression we have developed joint defenses and joint vulnerabilities to each other that are not duplicated in the white community, with the exception of the relationship between Jewish women and Jewish men.

On the other hand, white women face the pitfall of being seduced into joining the oppressor under the pretense of sharing power. This possibility does not exist in the same way for women of Color. The tokenism that is sometimes extended to us is not an invitation to join power; our racial 'otherness' is a visible reality that makes that quite clear. For white women there is a wider range of pretended choices and rewards for identifying with patriarchal power and its tools."



6) "I speak here as a woman of Color who is not bent upon destruction, but upon survival. No woman is responsible for altering the psyche of her oppressor, even when that psyche is embodied in another woman. I have suckled the wolf's lip of anger and I have used it for illumination, laughter, protection, fire in places where there was no light, no food, no sisters, no quarter. We are not goddesses or matriarchs or edifices of divine forgiveness; we are not fiery fingers of judgment or instruments of flagellation; we are women forced back always upon our woman's power. We have learned to use anger as we have learned to use the dead flesh of animals, and bruised, battered, and changing, we have survived and grown and, in Angela Wilson's words, we are moving on. With or without uncolored women. We use whatever strengths we have fought for, including anger, to help define and fashion a world where all our sisters can grow, where our children can love, and where the power of touching and meeting another woman's difference and wonder will eventually transcend the need for destruction."



7) "The 60s were characterized by a heady belief in instantaneous solutions. They were vital years of awakening, of pride, and of error. The civil rights and Black power movements rekindled possibilities for disenfranchised groups within this nation. Even though we fought common enemies, at times the lure of individual solutions made us careless of each other. Sometimes we could not bear the face of each other's differences because of what we feared those differences might say about ourselves. As if everybody can't eventually be too Black, too white, too man, too woman. But any future vision which can encompass all of us, by definition, must be complex and expanding, not easy to achieve. The answer to cold is heat, the answer to hunger is food. But there is no simple monolithic solution to racism, to sexism, to homophobia. There is only the conscious focusing within each of my days to move against them, wherever I come up against these particular manifestations of the same disease. By seeing who the we is, we learn to use our energies with greater precision against our enemies rather than against ourselves."



8) "You do not have to be me in order for us to fight alongside each other. I do not have to be you to recognize that our wars are the same. What we must do is commit ourselves to some future that can include each other and to work toward that future with the particular strengths of our individual identities. And in order to do this, we must allow each other our differences at the same time as we recognize our sameness.

If our history has taught us anything, it is that action for change directed only against the external conditions of our oppressions is not enough. In order to be whole, we must recognize the despair oppression plants within each of us — that thin persistent voice that says our efforts are useless, it will never change, so why bother, accept it. And we must fight that inserted piece of selfdestruction that lives and flourishes like a poison inside of us, unexamined until it makes us turn upon ourselves in each other. But we can put our finger down upon that loathing buried deep within each one of us and see who it encourages us to despise, and we can lessen its potency by the knowledge of our real connectedness, arcing across our differences.

Hopefully, we can learn from the 60s that we cannot afford to do our enemies' work by destroying each other."



9) "Until now, there has been little that taught us how to be kind to each other. To the rest of the world, yes, but not to ourselves. There have been few external examples of how to treat another Black woman with kindness, deference, tenderness or an appreciative smile in passing, just because she IS; an understanding of each other's shortcomings because we have been somewhere close to that, ourselves. When last did you compliment another sister, give recognition to her specialness? We have to consciously study how to be tender with each other until it becomes a habit because what was native has been stolen from us, the love of Black women for each other. But we can practice being gentle with ourselves by being gentle with each other. We can practice being gentle with each other by being gentle with that piece of ourselves that is hardest to hold, by giving more to the brave bruised girlchild within each of us, by expecting a little less from her gargantuan efforts to excel. We can love her in the light as well as in the darkness, quiet her frenzy toward perfection and encourage her attentions toward fulfillment. Maybe then we will come to appreciate more how much she has taught us, and how much she is doing to keep this world revolving toward some livable future.

It would be ridiculous to believe that this process is not lengthy and difficult. It is suicidal to believe it is not possible. As we arm ourselves with ourselves and each other, we can stand toe to toe inside that rigorous loving and begin to speak the impossible — or what has always seemed like the impossible — to one another. The first step toward genuine change. Eventually, if we speak the truth to each other, it will become unavoidable to ourselves."