4
" Morning is an important time of day, because how you spend your morning can often tell you what kind of day you are going to have. For instance, if you wake up to the sound of twittering birds, and find yourself in an enormous canopy bed, with a butler standing next to you holding a breakfast of freshly made muffins and hand-squeezed orange juice on a silver tray, you will know that your day will be a splendid one. If you wake up to the sound of church bells, and find yourself in a fairly big regular bed, with a butler standing next to you holding a breakfast of hot tea and toast on a plate, you will know that your day will be O.K. And if you wake up to the sound of somebody banging two metal pots together, and find yourself in a small bunk bed, with a nasty foreman standing in the doorway holding no breakfast at all, you will know that your day will be horrid. "
― Lemony Snicket , Horseradish
6
" To Have Without Holding:
Learning to love differently is hard,
love with the hands wide open, love
with the doors banging on their hinges,
the cupboard unlocked, the wind
roaring and whimpering in the rooms
rustling the sheets and snapping the blinds
that thwack like rubber bands
in an open palm.
It hurts to love wide open
stretching the muscles that feel
as if they are made of wet plaster,
then of blunt knives, then
of sharp knives.
It hurts to thwart the reflexes
of grab, of clutch, to love and let
go again and again. It pesters to remember
the lover who is not in the bed,
to hold back what is owed to the work
that gutters like a candle in a cave
without air, to love consciously,
conscientiously, concretely, constructively.
I can't do it, you say it's killing
me, but you thrive, you glow
on the street like a neon raspberry,
You float and sail, a helium balloon
bright bachelor's buttons blue and bobbing
on the cold and hot winds of our breath,
as we make and unmake in passionate
diastole and systole the rhythm
of our unbound bonding, to have
and not to hold, to love
with minimized malice, hunger
and anger moment by moment balanced. "
― Marge Piercy
14
" How fast can you run?
When you really have to?
In heels and a work skirt, with your bag banging against your side: how fast?
When you’re late for your train and you have to get home, and you race down the platform with seconds to spare: how fast can you run?
What if it isn’t a train you’re running for, but your life?
If you’re late home from work, and there’s no one in sight. If you haven’t charged your phone and no one knows where you are. If the footsteps behind you are getting closer, and you know, because you do it every day, that you’re on your own; that between the platform and the exit you won’t see another soul.
If there’s breath on your neck, and the panic is rising, and it’s dark, and cold, and wet.
If it’s just the two of you.
Just you, and whoever’s behind you.
Whoever is chasing you.
How fast could you run then?
It doesn’t matter how fast.
Because there’s always someone who can run faster. "
― Clare Mackintosh , I See You
17
" Have you lost your teeny tiny mind, you too-tall, too-skinny, too-crazy jerk?”
“Oh, look who’s talking, Miss Let’s Blunder Around the Time Stream and Hang the Consequences! Thanks to you, we’ve got a dead Marc and a
live Marc in the same timeline . . . in the same house! Thanks to you, I got chomped on by a dim, blonde, undead, selfish, whorish, blood-sucking
leech when I was minding my own business in the past.”
“Don’t you call me dim!”
“Um. Everyone. Perhaps we should—” Tina began.
“Wait, when did this happen?” Marc asked. He had the look of a man desperately trying to buy a vowel. “Past, an hour ago? Past, last year? Help
me out.”
“Oh, biiiiig surprise!” Laura threw her (perfectly manicured) hands in the air. “Let me guess, you were soooo busy banging your dead husband
that you haven’t had time to tell anybody anything.”
“I was getting to it,” I whined.
“Then after not telling anyone anything and not being proactive—or even active!—you grow up to destroy the world and bring about eternal
nuclear winter or whatever the heck that was and how do you deal with your foreknowledge of terrible events to come? Have sex!”
“An affirmation of life?” Sinclair suggested. Never, I repeat, never had I loved him more. I was torn between slugging my sister and blowing my
husband. Hmm. Laura might have a point about my priorities . . . but jeez. Look at him. Yum.
“—even do it and what do you have to say for yourself? Huh?”
“You’re just uptight, repressed, smug, antisex, and jealous, you Antichristing morally superior, fundamentally evil bitch.”
Laura and Marc gasped. My husband groaned. "
― MaryJanice Davidson , Undead and Undermined (Undead, #10)
