11
" I haven't had a lot of good, soft things in my life," he said against my forehead. " Not since my family sent me away. Apart from being your sire and feeling that pull to you, it's that goodness, that softness and warmth, along with the resolve and strength in you, that I love. Being turned hasn't taken that from you. If someone were going to design the perfect mate for me, it would be you. Even when you infuriate me with your pigheaded stubbornness and your temper and incredible lack of anything resembling self-preservation—" " Stop describing me please." " You're the most fascinating, maddening, adorable creature I've ever met," he said, sighing and pushing my hair out of my eyes. " So, when I seem possessive or I'm raving like a lunatic, it's just that part of me is still very afraid that I'll lose that—that I'll lose you. I love you. "
14
" But drunkenly, or secretly, we swore,
Disciples of that astigmatic saint,
That we would never leave the island
Until we had put down, in paint, in words,
As palmists learn the network of a hand,
All of its sunken, leaf-choked ravines,
Every neglected, self-pitying inlet
Muttering in brackish dialect, the ropes of mangroves
From which old soldier crabs slipped
Surrendering to slush,
Each ochre track seeking some hilltop and
Losing itself in an unfinished phrase,
Under sand shipyards where the burnt-out palms
Inverted the design of unrigged schooners,
Entering forests, boiling with life,
Goyave, corrosol, bois-canot, sapotille.
Days!
The sun drumming, drumming,
Past the defeated pennons of the palms,
Roads limp from sunstroke,
Past green flutes of the grass
The ocean cannonading, come!
Wonder that opened like the fan
Of the dividing fronds
On some noon-struck sahara,
Where my heart from its rib cage yelped like a pup
After clouds of sanderlings rustily wheeling
The world on its ancient,
Invisible axis,
The breakers slow-dolphining over more breakers,
To swivel our easels down, as firm
As conquerors who had discovered home. "
― Derek Walcott , Another Life: Fully Annotated
15
" But usually not. Usually she thinks of the path to his house, whether deer had eaten the tops of the fiddleheads, why they don't eat the peppermint saprophytes sprouting along the creek; or she visualizes the approach to the cabin, its large windows, the fuchsias in front of it where Anna's hummingbirds always hover with dirty green plumage and jeweled throats. Sometimes she thinks about her dream, the one in which her mother wakes up with no hands. The cabin smells of oil paint, but also of pine. The painter's touch is sexual and not sexual, as she herself is....When the memory of that time came to her, it was touched by strangeness because it formed no pattern with the other events in her life. It lay in her memory like one piece of broken tile, salmon-coloured or the deep green of wet leaves, beautiful in itself but unusable in the design she was making "
― Robert Hass , Human Wishes
17
" Science is getting knocked on all sides these days, not only from religious fundamentalists, but from all kinds of people who perceive science as arrogant, one-sided, and the source of the troubles that come with the technology it produces. It's true that individuL scientists can be so arrogant and narrowly focused, they're blind to any but their own truths, and that new discoveries bring new problems with them. Still, I don't know many people who would refuse a biopsy for a newly discovered lump because they think science needs to be taken down a peg or two.
Religion gets knocked for the same kinds of reasons as science: for its arrogance, narowmindedness, and tendency to create more trouble than it's worth. Religion is also accused of concealing reality under a comforting blanket of measureless faith -- the flip side, perhaps of the scientist for whom nothing can be real until she has measured it.
My own sojourn into religion convinced me that good religion reveals rather than conceals. Religion is the soul in search of itself and its relationship to the cosmos. This journey requires looking at all of it: the joy, the sorrow, the beauty and the horror of life. We hope for the best. We want meaning and love to exist not only in ourselves, but in the very soul of the universe. At times this great hope might tempt us to pick and choose only the data that supports our desires. But in religion as in boat-building, the design must be tested in all conditions. When I say that I'm trying to pay attention, and that paying attention means being willing to look at all of it, I think I'm trying for the same moment of clarity that Graham experienced when the wind blew all over his theory. Looking at all of it is what good science is about. I believe that it's also what good religion is about. "
― Margaret D. McGee
20
" In the 1970s, while researching in the Library of Congress, I found an obscure history of religious architecture that assumed a fact as if it were common knowledge: the traditional design of most patriarchal buildings of worship imitates the female body. Thus, there is an outer and inner entrance, labia majora and labia minora; a central vaginal aisle toward the altar; two curved ovarian structures on either side; and then in the sacred center, the altar or womb, where the miracle takes place - where males gives birth.
Though this comparison was new to to me, it struck home like a rock down a well. Of course, I thought. The central ceremony of patriarchal religions is one in which men take over the yoni-power of creation by giving birth symbolically. No wonder male religious leaders so often say that humans were born in sin - because we were born to female creatures. Only by obeying the rules of the patriarchy can we be reborn through men. No wonder priests and ministers in skirts sprinkle imitation birth fluid over our heads, give us new names, and promise rebirth into everlasting life. No wonder the male priesthood tries to keep women away from the altar, just as women are kept away from control of our own powers of reproduction. Symbolic or real, it's all devoted to controlling the power that resides in the female body. "
― Eve Ensler , The Vagina Monologues