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1 " She could hear, some way off, her brothers calling to each other in the woods behind the house. She hoped desperately that their game wouldn't bring them any closer, that they wouldn't scare the birds away. Somehow she knew that you didn't get many moments like this in your life: moments when you knew, without any doubt, that you were alive, when you felt the air in your lungs and the wet grass beneath your feet and the cotton on your skin; moments when you were completely in the present, when neither the past nor the future mattered. She tried to slow her breathing, hoping somehow to make this moment last forever. "
― Neil Gaiman , Stardust
2 " It may seem to you that your life is over now. Your future without the person you love is no future at all.Death is a head-on collision with your plans.But everything in life--the gold fillings of your teeth, the cotton of your sheets, the air you breathe, all the food you will ever eat--everything there is was born from a collision.Inside every single thing that lives is a debt to a distant star that died.Nothing new is ever created without one thing colliding into another.And something new is created when the person you love dies.Because they are not the only ones who die: you die, too. The person you were when you were with them is gone just as surely as they are.This is what you should know about losing somebody you love. They do not travel alone. You go with them. "
― Augusten Burroughs , This Is How: Proven Aid in Overcoming Shyness, Molestation, Fatness, Spinsterhood, Grief, Disease, Lushery, Decrepitude & More. For Young and Old Alike.
3 " Tomas led a young woman by the hand and walked up into the foothills. Millian, the miner from Rosario, had introduced her to the patron, already buying points for himself. He was no fool. And the girl, no fool either, lifted her skirts for Tomas as he knelt before her, licking his way up her thighs -brown and sweet as candy, at the same time, tart and salty, musky, silken and cold in the warm air, refreshing as the sorbet he licked in Culiacan back when he was a student. She was amazed that this bit of her body could the great master to his knees before her. She was perhaps the most beautiful girl on that whole plain, but he did not her name and felt no need to ask. He pressed his face to her underwear, redolent with the burning scent of her, and he pulled the cotton down, over the bright points of her hips , the shadowy curve of her belly, until the fog of dark hair came into his sight, soft in the moonlight, tickling his face as he bent down to her again. He pressed his lips on the mound of her, breathing her in, tasting her like a dog, as her skirts fell over his head and her fingers pulled his head tighter to her, her legs moving apart in the dark, her beauty falling around him, his greatest gift to him, this flavor, this smell, her scent. "
― Luis Alberto Urrea , The Hummingbird's Daughter
4 " We are good at stories. We hoard them, like an old woman in a room full of boxes, but now and then we pull out our best, and spread them out. We talk of the bad years when the cotton didn't open, and the day my cousin Wanda was washed in the Blood. We buff our beloved ancestors until they are smooth of sin, and give our scoundrels a hard shake, although sometimes we can't remember exactly which is who. "
― Rick Bragg
5 " The next day we were all shooting up. " Jeez. Look at the size of the cotton he just threw in the spoon." " Yea. What are you trying to prove?" They had a good laugh at my expense. "