1
" But where was God now, with heaven full of astronauts, and the Lord overthrown? I miss God. I miss the company of someone utterly loyal. I still don't think of God as my betrayer. The servants of God, yes, but servants by their very nature betray. I miss God who was my friend. I don't even know if God exists, but I do know that if God is your emotional role model, very few human relationships will match up to it. I have an idea that one day it might be possible, I thought once it had become possible, and that glimpse has set me wandering, trying to find the balance between earth and sky. If the servants hadn't rushed in and parted us, I might have been disappointed, might have snatched off the white samite to find a bowl of soup.
As it is, I can't settle, I want someone who is fierce and will love me until death and know that love is as strong as death, and be on my side for ever and ever. I want someone who will destroy and be destroyed by me. There are many forms of love and affection, some people can spend their whole lives together without knowing each other's names. Naming is a difficult and time-consuming process; it concerns essences, and it means power. But on the wild nights who can call you home? Only the one who knows your name. Romantic love has been diluted into paperback form and has sold thousands and millions of copies. Somewhere it is still in the original, written on tablets of stone. I would cross seas and suffer sunstroke and give away all I have, but not for a man, because they want to be the destroyer and never the destroyed. "
― Jeanette Winterson , Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
10
" Prior to having sex for the first time, I had read many books and magazines, pornographic and otherwise, and I'd developed certain expectations of intercourse. From paperback romances I expected to feel vaguely yet ecstatically ravished, as if, for the duration of the act, I would experience everything an ad for a drugstore cologne could ever promise. From more serious fiction, I assumed that I would be blasted with a torrent of conflicting emotions, flashbacks to my birth, a rough kinship with the natural world, perhaps a Booker Prize, and, ultimately, a sense of existential ennui. From mainstream movies, I hoped for a beautifully lit and choreographed series of thrusts and embraces, with my head thrown back, my eyes shut but not squinched, and my lips slightly but appealingly parted; I also felt that the sex might be edited, continually leaping forward in the attractive bits and pieces, with only the dewiest bodily fluids. From porn, I trusted that sex would be alternately savage, degrading, pounding, and dull, and all of this sounded promising. From what my parents had told me, I knew that sex did not exist, and from what other schoolchildren had let on, I imagined that there was a real danger of getting stuck in one position or another, with the parties involved finally getting yanked apart in the emergency room. "
― Paul Rudnick , I Shudder and Other Reactions to Life, Death, and New Jersey
12
" LED lighting has its place: cold, detached, hollow places like office buildings, factories, fast food chains and public schools - places full of humans but no human emotions. LED lighting really belongs in the apathy of the digital age, where science and technology rules over friendship, love and freedom. Incandescent light bulbs have a warm yellow-orange glow like the glow of a nice fireplace, where friends and family might sit and talk together or where children might open Christmas presents, a glow that can project celluloid films and bring back old memories, a glow that can light the text of a paperback novel. Something that beautiful, with that much power, could never last very long in a time as depressing and uncertain as the 21st century. "
17
" At childhood’s end, the houses petered outinto playing fields, the factory, allotmentskept, like mistresses, by kneeling married men, the silent railway line, the hermit’s caravan, till you came at last to the edge of the woods. It was there that I first clapped eyes on the wolf. He stood in a clearing, reading his verse out loud in his wolfy drawl, a paperback in his hairy paw, red wine staining his bearded jaw. What big earshe had! What big eyes he had! What teeth!In the interval, I made quite sure he spotted me, sweet sixteen, never been, babe, waif, and bought me a drink, my first. You might ask why. Here’s why. Poetry.The wolf, I knew, would lead me deep into the woods,away from home, to a dark tangled thorny placelit by the eyes of owls. I crawled in his wake,my stockings ripped to shreds, scraps of red from my blazersnagged on twig and branch, murder clues. I lost both shoesbut got there, wolf’s lair, better beware. Lesson one that night, breath of the wolf in my ear, was the love poem.I clung till dawn to his thrashing fur, forwhat little girl doesn’t dearly love a wolf?Then I slid from between his heavy matted pawsand went in search of a living bird – white dove –which flew, straight, from my hands to his hope mouth.One bite, dead. How nice, breakfast in bed, he said,licking his chops. As soon as he slept, I crept to the backof the lair, where a whole wall was crimson, gold, aglow with books.Words, words were truly alive on the tongue, in the head,warm, beating, frantic, winged; music and blood.But then I was young – and it took ten years in the woods to tell that a mushroomstoppers the mouth of a buried corpse, that birdsare the uttered thought of trees, that a greying wolfhowls the same old song at the moon, year in, year out,season after season, same rhyme, same reason. I took an axeto a willow to see how it wept. I took an axe to a salmonto see how it leapt. I took an axe to the wolfas he slept, one chop, scrotum to throat, and saw the glistening, virgin white of my grandmother’s bones.I filled his old belly with stones. I stitched him up.Out of the forest I come with my flowers, singing, all "
19
" Page 15, paperback version by Virago Press 1997:
... Let me ask you this, Mr Ai: do you know, by your own experience, what patriotism is?”
‘No’, I said, shaken by the force of the intese personality suddenly turning itself wholly upon me. ‘I don´t think I do. If by patriotism you don´t mean the love of one`s homeland, for that I do know.’
‘No, I don’t mean love, when I say patriotism. I mean fear. The fear of the other. And its expressions are political, not poetical: hate, rivalry, aggression. It grows in us, that fear. It grows in us year by year. We’ve followed our road too far. And you, who hardly know what I’m talking about, who show us the new road –‘ He broke off. After a while he went on, in control again, cool and polite: ‘It’s because of fear that I refuse to urge your cause with the king, now. But not fear for myself, Mr. Ai. I’m not acting patriotically. There are, after all, other nations on Gethen. "
― Ursula K. Le Guin , The Left Hand of Darkness (Hainish Cycle, #4)
