Cliff's Edge Quotes

Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around - nobody big, I mean - except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff - I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be.

And that was it. All this buildup to a great leap, and I didn't fall or fly. Instead I found myself back on the edge of the cliff, blinking, wondering if I'd ever jumped at all. It's not supposed to be like this.

Advice? I don’t have advice. Stop aspiring and start writing. If you’re writing, you’re a writer. Write like you’re a goddamn death row inmate and the governor is out of the country and there’s no chance for a pardon. Write like you’re clinging to the edge of a cliff, white knuckles, on your last breath, and you’ve got just one last thing to say, like you’re a bird flying over us and you can see everything, and please, for God’s sake, tell us something that will save us from ourselves. Take a deep breath and tell us your deepest, darkest secret, so we can wipe our brow and know that we’re not alone. Write like you have a message from the king. Or don’t. Who knows, maybe you’re one of the lucky ones who doesn’t have to.

We think a flower on a cliff is beautiful Because we stop our feet at the cliff's edge Unable to step out into the sky Like that fearless flower --Sosuke Aizen,Flower on the Precipice

Hoover Dam," Thalia said. "It's huge." We stood at the river's edge, looking up at a curve of concrete that loomed between the cliffs. People were walking along the top of the dam. They were so tiny they looked like fleas. The naiads had left with a lot of grumbling—not in words I could understand, but it was obvious they hated this dam blocking up their nice river. Our canoes floated back downstream, swirling in the wake from the dam's discharge vents. "Seven hundred feet tall," I said. "Built in the 1930s." "Five million cubic acres of water," Thalia said. Graver sighed. "Largest construction project in the United States." Zoe stared at us. "How do you know all that?" "Annabeth," I said. "She liked architecture." "She was nuts about monuments," Thalia said. "Spouted facts all the time." Grover sniffled. "So annoying." "I wish she were here," I said.

His lips are on mine, hard and warm and pressing. The touch is electrifying, but not like I'm used to. This isn't a spark of destruction, but a spark of life. As much as I want to pull away, I just can't do it. Cal is a cliff and I throw myself over the edge, not bothering to think of what it could do to us both. One day he'll realize I'm his enemy, and all this will be a far-gone memory. But not yet.

Everyone's on the cliff edge of normal. Everyone finds life an utter nightmare sometimes, and there's no 'normal' way of dealing with it... There is no normal, Evelyn.

Go to the edge of the cliff and jump off. Build your wings on the way down.--Ray Bradbury

There is a story of a woman running away from tigers. She runs and runs and the tigers are getting closer and closer. When she comes to the edge of a cliff, she sees some vines there, so she climbs down and holds on to the vines. Looking down, she sees that there are tigers below her as well. She then notices that a mouse is gnawing away at the vine to which she is clinging. She also sees a beautiful little bunch of strawberries close to her, growing out of a clump of grass. She looks up and she looks down. She looks at the mouse. Then she just takes a strawberry, puts it in her mouth, and enjoys it thoroughly. Tigers above, tigers below. This is actually the predicament that we are always in, in terms of our birth and death. Each moment is just what it is. It might be the only moment of our life; it might be the only strawberry we’ll ever eat. We could get depressed about it, or we could finally appreciate it and delight in the preciousness of every single moment of our life.

There are not many persons who know what wonders are opened to them in the stories and visions of their youth; for when as children we learn and dream, we think but half-formed thoughts, and when as men we try to remember, we are dulled and prosaic with the poison of life. But some of us awake in the night with strange phantasms of enchanted hills and gardens, of fountains that sing in the sun, of golden cliffs overhanging murmuring seas, of plains that stretch down to sleeping cities of bronze and stone, and of shadowy companies of heroes that ride caparisoned white horses along the edges of thick forests; and then we know that we have looked back through the ivory gates into that world of wonder which was ours before we were wise and unhappy.

It's as if I've stepped off the edge of a cliff, and even though my heart's in my mouth and my stomach is in knots, I'm the most excited I've ever been in my life. I'm totally enthralled by him. I want him, every part of him, and I desperately want him to feel the same way about me.

But the act, called the sexual act, is not for the depositing of seed. It is for leaping off into the unknown, as from a cliff's edge, like Sappho into the sea.

Instead, Nina Riva stood on the edge of the cliff she'd never wanted, and looked out onto the water she wished was closer, and for the first time in her quiet life, screamed into the wind.

God, I am walking to the edge of a cliff. Build me a bridge. I need to get to the other side.

Love is a path lined with roses." I say bitterly. "But it leads to a cliff's edge and all who follow it tumble to their doom. You will not find your happiness there.

He'd lived so long in anticipation of his own death that to contemplate his future was like standing at the edge of a cliff, staring into a vertiginous rush of open sky.

I live through risk. Without risk there is no art. You should always be on the edge of a cliff about to fall down and break your neck.

I remember I once saw this old movie...; in it the main character was talking about how sad it is that the last time you have sex you don't know it's the last time. Since I've never even had a first time, I'm not exactly an expert, but I'm guessing it's like that for most things in life--the last kiss, the last laugh, the last cup of coffee, the last sunset, the last time you jump through a sprinkler or eat an ice-cream cone, or stick your tongue out to catch a snowflake. You just don't know. But I think that's a good thing, really, because if you did know it would be almost impossible to let go. When you do know, it's like being asked to step off the edge of a cliff: all you want to do is get down on your hands and knees and kiss the solid ground, smell it, hold on to it.

She was on a high cliff edge somewhere between laughing and crying and screaming.

I recognize that sound. It's the sound of holding on to a cliff by the edge of your nails. The sound of barely containing a pain so immense that to look at it, to raise your own flesh and examine what's beneath, is to risk falling into a darkness you know you'll never escape.

Forcing myself to make conversation felt like standing on a cliff, peering over the edge, about to tumble down headfirst.

A laugh jumps out of my mouth, surprising me. I can’t even remember the last time I laughed and it puts me on edge. I suddenly want to do the same thing to her. Let her see how it feels to teeter on that cliff.

Nobody thought it could be done, so nobody had tried before. Standing with one foot in the abyss and the other with a foothold in her dreams, she stood on the edge of a cliff. She took one look behind and with one last deep breath, she leapt with reckless certainty and decisive confidence. Blurring through the sky, for a moment she looked like she would fade into darkness, but in the very last moment when everyone else had given up on her, from her back spread wings. With a leap of faith, she learned to fly.

Something had been confirmed: I was worth giving a shit about; I was getting to be a successful sick person. Sick is when they say something. Of course, I had been sick for five years. But now, now maybe I was really sick. Maybe I wasgetting good at this, good enough to scare people. Maybe I would almost die, and balance just there, at the edge of the cliff, wavering while they gasped and clutched one another's arms, and win acclaim for my death-defying stunts.

She had what I'd call a lemming ass - that is, an ass that you would follow right over the edge of the cliff.

My mother's voice intruded on a dream in which a large animated eggplant named Bob teetered on the edge of a cliff with thoughts of suicide and Parmesan.

Those who knew but one path would come to worship it, even as it led to a cliff's edge.

I don’t want to be a widow, I don’t want Michael Bayning, and I don’t want you to joke about such things, you tactless clodpole!” As all three of them stared at her openmouthed, Poppy leapt up and stalked away, her hands drawn into fists. Bewildered by the immediate force of her fury—it was like being stung by a butterfly—Harry stared after her dumbly. After a moment, he asked the first coherent thought that came to him. “Did she just say she doesn’t want Bayning?” “Yes,” Win said, a smile hovering on her lips. “That’s what she said. Go after her, Harry.” Every cell in Harry’s body longed to comply. Except that he had the feeling of standing on the edge of a cliff, with one ill-chosen word likely to send him over. He gave Poppy’s sister a desperate glance. “What should I say?” “Be honest with her about your feelings,” Win suggested. A frown settled on Harry’s face as he considered that. “What’s my second option?

Keep your words. This pain is no life." "You only feel pain because you're alive, boy!" the keeper thundered. "This is the mystery of it. Life is lived on the ragged edge of the cliff. Fall off and you might die, but run from it and you are already dead!

There was nothing between the ranch and the nearest town except a windy, two-lane mountain road edged with pine trees, meadows, cliffs and boulders. No Dairy Queen, no Circle K, nothing.

I was unfair to him, of course, but where would I have been without unfairness? In thrall, in harness. Young women need unfairness, it's one of their few defenses. They need their callousness, they need their ignorance. They walk in the dark, along the edges of high cliffs, humming to themselves, thinking themselves invulnerable.

As much as I want to pull away, I just can't do it. Cal is a cliff, and I throw myself over the edge, not bothering to think of what it could do to us both. One day he'll realise that I am his enemy, and all this will be a far-gone memory. But not yet.

Kissing him was like standing on the edge of a cliff. Nice view, but you knew it was deadly.

Male sexuality. So artless, so crass. Men are always over the edge, right? One little push and they tumble down the cliff.

Each moment is a leap forwards from the brink of an invisible cliff, where time’s keen edges are constantly renewed. We lift our foot from the solid ground of all our life lived thus far, and take that perilous step out into the empty air. Not because we can claim any particular courage, but because there is no other way.

That's what nobody realizes. Two seconds are huge. It's the difference between something happening and something not happening. You could take one step too many and fall over the edge of a cliff. It's very dangerous.

The apartment was built at the edge of a high cliff so that when you looked out the back window it seemed as if you were twelve floors up instead of four. It was very much like living on the edge of the world - a last resting place before the final big drop.

There's a cliff at the end point of a person's life; most us of peer over the edge of it, hanging on. That's why, when someone chooses to let go, it's so dramatically visible. The body will seem almost transparent. The eys will be looking at something the rest of us can't see.

Thresholds are dangerous places, neither here nor there, and walking across one is like stepping off the edge of a cliff in the naive faith that you'll sprout wings halfway down. You can't hesitate, or doubt. You can't fear the in-between.

Cal is a cliff, and I throw myself over the edge, not bothering to think of what it could do to us both.

To err is to wander and wandering is the way we discover the world and lost in thought it is the also the way we discover ourselves. Being right might be gratifying but in the end it is static a mere statement. Being wrong is hard and humbling and sometimes even dangerous but in the end it is a journey and a story. Who really wants to stay at home and be right when you can don your armor spring up on your steed and go forth to explore the world True you might get lost along get stranded in a swamp have a scare at the edge of a cliff thieves might steal your gold brigands might imprison you in a cave sorcerers might turn you into a toad but what of what To fuck up is to find adventure: it is in the spirit that this book is written.

Some people come to the edge of the cliff and they look over, then run away in fear. They never realize it's possible to fly, to soar, to be free. They spend their lives crawling along cliff tops without finding the courage.

The only constant in our marriage is the edge of the cliff we're hanging on to, killing time until we tire ourselves out and give in to our inevitable collapse.

I feel like the whole world is off balance. Like I'm losing my shit. Like there's this cliff and I don't even realize I'm on the edge.

There is no life that does not have the material for despair in it, but some people go too close to the edge and others manage to stay sometimes sad in a safe clearing far from the cliffs. Once you cross over, the rules all change.

Stare at him," said Ghost. "They won't bite you if you keep staring at them." Steve backed away. "They bite?" Not really. They hiss at you, mostly. The only time geese are ever dangerous is when you happen to be standing on the edge of a cliff. I heard about a guy that almost got killed that way." By geese?" Yeah, there was a whole flock of them coming after him. All hissing and cackling and stabbing at his ankles with their big ol' beaks. He didn't know you had to stare them right in the eye, and he panicked. They backed him right over a fifty-foot cliff." So how come he didn't die?" This guy had wings," said Ghost. "He flew away.

It was as if I’d been standing on the edge of a cliff my whole life, and finally, after meeting Jeremy, I felt confident enough to jump. Because—for the first time in my life—I felt confident that I wouldn’t land. I would keep flying.

I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all… I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff - I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye

In her dreams the Hawk would be waiting for her by the sea's edge; her kilt-clad, magnificent Scottish laird. He would smile and his eyes would crinkle, then turn dark with smoldering passion. She would take his hand and lay it gently on her swelling abdomen, and his face would blaze with happiness and pride. Then he would take her gently, there on the cliff's edge, in tempo with the pounding of the ocean. He would make fierce and possessive love to her and she would hold on to him as tightly as she could. But before dawn, he would melt right through her fingers. And she would wake up, her cheeks wet with tears and her hands clutching nothing but a bit of quilt or pillow.

You want to fall, that's all. You think it can't go on like that. It's as if your life is a perch on the edge of a cliff and going forward seems impossible, not for a lack of will, but a lack of space. The possibility of another day stands in defiance of the laws of physics. And you can't go back. So you want to fall, let go, give up, but you can't. And every breath you take reminds you of that fact. So it goes.

It’s right to say that people fall in love. We don’t glide, slip, or stumble into it. Instead we tumble head first from the moment we decide to step off the edge of a cliff with someone and see whether we’ll fly together. Love might be irrational, but we make the choice to risk everything.

I look down past the stars to a terrifying darkness. I seem to recognize the place, but it's impossible. "Accident," I whisper. I will fall. I seem to desire the fall, and though I fight it with all my will I know in advance I can't win. Standing baffled, quaking with fear, three feet from the edge of a nightmare cliff, I find myself, incredibly, moving towards it. I look down, down, into bottomless blackness, feeling the dark power moving in me like an ocean current, some monster inside me, deep sea wonder, dread night monarch astir in his cave, moving me slowly to my voluntary tumble into death.

I paid bills and bought groceries and got my eyes checked while the days crumbled away like debris from a cliff face. Life a continuous backing away from the edge.

Do you think it’s possible to become a different person?" She shakes her head, biting her bottom lip, and blinks so hard she can’t see the road in front of her. "No. But it’s possible to become a better person." Then he holds out a trembling hand. She holds it as if he were three years old, as if he were dangling over the edge of a cliff.

I thought it was, "If a body catch a body," Anyway, i keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and no ones around - nobody big I mean - except me. And I'm standing on the edge of this crazy cliff. What i have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff - I mean if they're running and they don't look where they are going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know its crazy, but that the only thing I's really like to be. I know its crazy.

I was happy with myself before – with my little life. But this is different. It feels like I’m on the edge of a mountain cliff, the wind whipping my hair, the sun blinding – but there is no fear. Only exhilaration, pure and right. I’m not going to fall. I can’t. Because Henry has shown me how to fly.

like a mountain path that ends at a cliff I travel along the edge of your thoughts, and my shadow falls from your white forehead, my shadow shatters, and I gather the pieces and go with no body, groping my way

I don’t know what to do today, help me decide. Should I cut myself open and pour my heart on these pages? Or should I sit here and do nothing, nobody’s asking anything of me after all? Should I jump off the cliff that has my heart beating so and develop my wings on the way down? Or should I step back from the edge, and let the others deal with this thing called courage? Should I stare back at the existential abyss that haunts me so and try desperately to grab from it a sense of self? Or should I keep walking half-asleep, only half-looking at it every now and then in times in which I can’t help doing anything but? Should I kill myself or have a cup of coffee?

Of course, I feared that the joy I felt, like certain trees, had taken root at the edge of a craggy cliff. They may crane their necks and turn their leaves all they want toward the sun, but gravity has the last word.

It was the strangest sensation, fallin' in love. 'Bout the only thing I compare it to would be jumpin' off a big cliff. Once you're past the edge, there ain't no particular reason to be graspin' for a line a safety. You just keep on fallin' anyhow, so you might as well enjoy it the whole way down.

I don't believe in the hero that sets out to climb a mountain and achieves it with no setbacks. I he does, he obviously didn't set his goals high enough and shouldn't even have anything to be proud of. He didn't challenge himself enough. He might have learned a thing or two, but the real lessons are taught when you're balancing on the very edge, with one foot over the cliff, everyone expecting you to fall. That's when you realise your potential. Or rather, how far away from your own potential you actually are.

But sometimes, maybe most times, it isn't that clear. It is dark and you are near the edge of a cliff, but you're moving slowly, not sure which direction you're heading in. Your steps are tentative but they are still blind in the night. You don't realize how close you are to the edge, how the soft earth could give away, how you could just slip a bit and suddenly plunge into the dark.

It's 'If a body meet a body coming through the rye'!" old Phoebe said. "It's a poem. By Robert Burns." "I know it's a poem by Robert Burns." She was right, though. It is "If a body meet a body coming through the rye." I didn't know it then, though. "I thought it was 'If a body catch a body,'" I said. "Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around — nobody big, I mean — except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff — I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be. I know it's crazy.

Kissing him was like standing on the edge of a cliff. Nice view, but you knew it was deadly. Still, a stupid, irrational, dangerously alive part of you still wanted to hurl yourself down to meet your own demise.

Slowly, painfully, I let go. It was like prying my own fingers off the edge of the cliff. And that hurt too-particularly the falling part, and not being sure what was at the bottom. But I did know. Now was what was at the bottom. I was already there.

After seeing Dr Thorn turn into a monster and plummet off the edge of a cliff with Annabeth, you’d think nothing else could shock me. But when this twelve-year-old girl told me she was the goddess Artemis, I said something really intelligent like, ‘Um… okay.

To what extent does anybody control his destiny? Life is very much like falling of the edge of a cliff. You have complete freedom to make all the choices you want to take on your way down. My characters choose to yearn and not lose hope even when the odds are completely against them. It doesn't make the landing at the end of that fall any less painful but, somehow, it helps them keep a little dignity their bone broken body.

Rush please," I begged, fighting the urge to grab his hand and force him to bring me relief from the throbbing underneath his touch "I need..." I didn't know what I needed. I just needed. Rush lifted his head and ran his nose up my neck then pressed a kiss to my chin. "I know what you need. I'm just not sure I can handle watching you get it. You've got me all kinds of worked up, girl. I'm trying hard to be a good boy. I can't lose control in the back of damn car." I shook my head. He couldn't stop. I didn't want him to be good. I wanted him inside me. Now. "Please, don't be good. Please," I begged. Rush let out a rugged breath "Shit, baby. Stop it. I'm going to explode. I'll give you your release but when I finally bury myself inside you for the first time you won't be sprawled in the back of my car. You'll be in my bed." His hand moved before I could respond and my eyes rolled back in my head. "That's it. Come for me, sweet Blaire. Come on my hand and let me feel it. I want to watch you." His words sent me spiralling over the edge of the cliff I'd been trying so hard to reach. "Ruuuuuush!" I heard the loud cry that came from me as i went falling into complete bliss. I knew I was crying for him, screaming out his name and maybe even clawing at him but I could no longer control myself. The ecstasy was too much.

He argued that every certainty is an empty throne. That those who knew but one path would come to worship it, even as it led to a cliff’s edge. He argued, and in the silence of that ghost’s indifference to his words he came to realize that he himself spoke – fierce with heat – from the foot of an empty throne.

She felt the words dangling there, felt herself dangling there, off the edge of the cliff. She swallowed. But Rowan had caught her each time she had fallen- first, when she had plummeted into that abyss of despair and grief; second, when that castle had shattered and she had plunged to the earth. And now this time, this third time...She was not afraid. Aelin met Rowan's stare and said clearly and baldly and without a speckle of doubt, I love you. I am in love with you, Rowan.

Aomame closed her eyes and, in a split second, reviewed the long span of years as if standing on the edge of a sheer cliff, surveying an ocean channel below. She could smell the sea. She could hear the deep sighing of the wind.

Robin’s mind was spinning with claret, or else he wouldn’t have managed what he said next. ‘Why won’t you dance with Letty?’ ‘I’m not looking to start a row.’ ‘No, really.’ ‘Please, Birdie.’ Ramy sighed. ‘You know how it is.’ ‘She wants you,’ Robin said. He’d only just realized this, and now that he said it out loud, it seemed so obvious that he felt stupid for not seeing it earlier. ‘Very badly. So why—’ ‘Don’t you know why?’ Their eyes met. Robin felt a prickle at the back of his neck. The space between them felt very charged, like the moment between lightning and thunder, and Robin had no idea what was going on or what would happen next, only that it all felt very strange and terrifying, like teetering over the edge of a windy, roaring cliff.

Pursuing dreams can be daunting. It feels like you're standing on the edge of a cliff staring at your dream as it sits on a cloud, floating out in the open air, and all you need to do is take that leap to see if you'll fall or if you'll fly.

I fell in that moment. Not in love. I just…fell. It was as if I’d been standing on the edge of a cliff my whole life, and finally, after meeting Jeremy, I felt confident enough to jump. Because—for the first time in my life—I felt confident that I wouldn’t land. I would keep flying.

I was unfair to him, of course, but where would I have been without unfairness? In thrall, in harness. Young women need unfairness, it’s one of their few defenses. They need their callousness, they need their ignorance. They walk in the dark, along the edges of high cliffs, humming to themselves, thinking themselves invulnerable.

...some small part of her had reacted to the passion inside him. Despite his role as a titled gentleman, there seemed to be a facet inside him that society could not tame, something stimulating yet dangerous, like standing at the edge of a cliff and feeling the mysterious, subtle pull to jump.

At times poetry is the vertigo of bodies and the vertigo of speech and the vertigo of death; the walk with eyes closed along the edge of the cliff, and the verbena in submarine gardens; the laughter that sets on fire the rules and the holy commandments; the descent of parachuting words onto the sands of the page; the despair that boards a paper boat and crosses, for forty nights and forty days, the night-sorrow sea and the day-sorrow desert; the idolatry of the self and the desecration of the self and the dissipation of the self; the beheading of epithets, the burial of mirrors; the recollection of pronouns freshly cut in the garden of Epicurus, and the garden of Netzahualcoyotl; the flute solo on the terrace of memory and the dance of flames in the cave of thought; the migrations of millions of verbs, wings and claws, seeds and hands; the nouns, bony and full of roots, planted on the waves of language; the love unseen and the love unheard and the love unsaid: the love in love.

. . . I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff—I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all.

It was a gift. What did I do with it? Life didn't accumulate as I'd once imagined. I graduated from boarding school, two years of college. Persisted through the blank decade in Los Angeles. I buried first my mother, then my father. His hair gone wispy as a child's. I paid bills and bought groceries and got my eyes checked while the days crumbled away like debris from a cliff face. Life a continuous backing away from the edge.

Most of my favorite stories as a reader come in at this length. Short novels are all killer, no filler. They offer the economy of the short story but the depth of characterization we associate with longer works. Little novels aren’t leisurely, meandering journeys. They’re drag races. You put the pedal to the floor and run your narrative right off the edge of the cliff. Live fast and leave a pretty corpse is a shitty objective for a human being but a pretty good plan for a story.

You’re a survivor. Voron put you on the edge of that cliff again and again until he conditioned you to claw onto life. You’ll do whatever you have to do to survive, and I’m your only chance of getting out. At first you’ll balk, but with every passing hour my offer will look better and better. You’ll convince yourself that dying will accomplish nothing and you should at least go out with a bang. You’ll tell yourself that you’re accepting my offer just so you can stick that broken sword into my chest and feel it cut through my heart. Even if you die afterward, the fact that I’ll stop breathing makes your death mean something. So you’ll call me. And you’ll try to kill me. Except you’ve gone three days without food, and that body . . .” He tilted his head and looked me over slowly. “That body burns through calories like fire goes through gasoline. You’re running out of reserves. I can put you down with one hit.” “You’re right about the sword. You broke mine. I owe you one.” He tapped his naked chest over his heart. “This is the spot. Give it a shot, Kate. Let’s see what happens.

Those girls are on the road to trouble,” I heard an older woman say about us one night, as we were staggering down the street drunk—and that woman was absolutely right. What she didn’t understand, though, is that trouble is what we wanted. Oh, our youthful needs! Oh, the deliciously blinding yearnings of the young—which inevitably take us right to the edges of cliffs, or trap us in cul-de-sacs of our design.

And after all, kids will be kids. The problem is, if you let kids be kids, then before you know it they're smearing their faces in pigs' blood, pushing each other off the edge of cliffs and smashing their mates' heads in with rocks. Our job as teachers, adults and parents is to stop, at every level, kids being kids, or they'll tear the fucking world down around our ears.

Adversity forced awareness on us, and it works, it bites us when we go too near the fire, when we love too hard. Those felt sensations are the beginning of the invention of the self. And if that works, why not feeling disgust for shit, fearing the cliff edge and strangers, remembering insults and favours, liking sex and food? God said, Let there be pain. And there was poetry. Eventually.

His angelic wings blackened when the dark fury assailed his mind. Summoning new strength from the unholy power that ravaged his soul, grieved to drastic levels of desperation by the tainting of the holy light within him, he combated ally and enemy alike, bent on destroying both sides in order to ensure the quelling of the dark energies there and then. For days and nights, the lone warrior bathed himself in the blood of angels and demons. And when it was over, he stood alone on contaminated land, with a contaminated soul. He was banned forever from Heaven and not even Hell had space for a creature which seemed to cherish Oblivion over Pandemonium. The dark angel, not so far removed from his former self as his superiors seemed to believe, died on the edge of the cliffs, of utter loneliness and despair.

Everyone thinks that it was the big strong caveman who got the girl, and for the most part, that may have been true, but physical strength doesn't explain how our species created civilization. I think there was always some scrawny dreamer sitting at the edge of the firelight, who had the ability to imagine dangers, to look into the future in his imagination and see possibilities, and therefore survived to pass his genes on to the next generation. When the big ape men ended up running off the cliff or getting killed while trying to beat a mastodon into submission with a stick, the dreamer was standing back thinking 'Hey, that might work, but you need to run the mastodon off the cliff.' And, then he'd mate with the women left over after the go-getters got killed.

He stood naked at the edge of a cliff. THe lake lay far below him. A frozen explosion of granite burst in flight to the sky over motionless water. The water seemed immovable, the stone- flowing. The stone had the stillness of one last movement when thrust meets thrust and the currents are held in a pause more dynamic than motion. THe stone glowed wet with sunrays. The lake below was only a thin steel ring that cut the rocks in half. The rocks went on into the depth, unchanged. They began and ended in the sky so that the world seemed suspended in space, an island floating on on nothing, anchored to the feet of the man on the cliff. His body leaned back against the sky. It was a body of long straight lines and angles each curve broken into planes. He stood rigid his hands hanging at his sides, palms out. He felt his shoulder blades drawn tight together. The curve of his neck, and the weight of the blood in his hands. He felt the wind behind him in the hollow of his spine. The wind waved his hair against the sky. His hair was neither blonde nor red, but the exact color or ripe orange rind... He stepped to the edge, raised his arms, and dived down into the sky below.

If you really believe this is what you want, you're lying to yourself.' 'I'm not lying to myself,' Jacks snarled. 'Then tell me this is what you truly want. Swear you want this more than anything else and I'll never mention it again.' Jacks grabbed her by the shoulders and looked directly in to her eyes. For a minute, he didn't speak. He just looked at her, at the remaining blood still on her lips and the dried tears staining her cheeks. 'I swear this is what I really want.' He spoke each word like a vow. 'I want to erase every moment you and I have spent together, every word you've said to me, and every time I've touched you, because if I don't, I'll kill you, just like I killed the Fox.' Evangeline's heart stopped. She searched Jacks' eyes, but all she saw was darkness, and all she felt was the press of his hands. He held on to her the way a person might grasp the edge of a cliff, knowing once they let go, there was no taking hold again.

As she fell, Esther wasn’t worried about being blown off course and plummeting into the rocks below. She wasn’t worried about hitting the shallows and pin diving to the ocean floor and shattering her spine. She wasn’t even worried about Cthulhu. (Okay, maybe a little.) What she worried about was Eugene’s willingness to jump. The way he glanced down at the water far below and looked at it like it was home. The way he stepped lightly from the cliff’s edge, and the way he fell through the air faster than she did, dragged down by earth’s magnetic field. The way he flickered in the sunlight as he hit the water, the same way Tyler Durden flashed on-screen four times before you saw him solidly. Foreshadowing the twist to come. Eugene was afraid of demons, and monsters, and above all the dark, but he was not afraid of death. That scared her more than anything.

Most other people, your wife included, with her unerring inner compass, seem to be able to get around without difficulty. They know where they are, where they have been, and where they are going, but you know nothing, you are forever lost in the moment, in the void of each successive moment that engulfs you, with no idea where true north is, since the four cardinal points do not exist for you, have never existed for you. A minor infirmity until now, with no dramatic consequences to speak of, but that doesn’t mean a day won’t come when you accidentally walk off the edge of a cliff.

I walk lighter, stumble less, with more spring in leg and lung, keeping my center of gravity deep in the belly, and letting that center 'see.' At these times, I am free of vertigo, even in dangerous places; my feet move naturally to firm footholds, and I flow. But sometimes for a day or more, I lose this feel of things, my breath is high up in my chest, and then I cling to the cliff edge as to life itself. And of course it is this clinging, the tightness of panic, that gets people killed: 'to clutch,' in ancient Egyptian, 'to clutch the mountain,' in Assyrian, were euphemisms that signified 'to die'" (125).

Imaginings and resonances and pain and small longings and prejudices. They mean nothing against the resolute hardness of the sea. They meant less than the marl and the mud and the dry clay of the cliff that were eaten away by the weather, washed away by the sea. It was not just that they would fade: they hardly existed, they did not matter, they would have no impact on this cold dawn, this deserted remote seascape where the water shone in the early light and shocked her with its sullen beauty. It might have been better, she felt, if there had never been people, if this turning of the world, and the glistening sea, and the morning breeze happened without witnesses, without anyone feeling, or remembering, or dying, or trying to love. She stood at the edge of the cliff until the sun came out from behind the black rainclouds,

Boo-Boo Pennyroyal did not like her male and female slaves to mingle. In the operas that she adored, young people brought together in tragic circumstances were forever falling in love with each other and then throwing themselves off things (cliffs, mostly, but sometimes battlements, or rooftops, or the brinks of volcanoes). Boo-Boo was fond of her slaves, and it pained her to think of them plummeting in pairs off the edges of Cloud 9, so she nipped all tragic love affairs firmly in the bud by forbidding the girls and boys to speak to one another. Of course, young people being what they were, girls sometimes fell in love with other girls, or boys with boys, but that never happened in the operas, so Boo-Boo didn't notice.

For folks who have that casual-dude energy coursing through their bloodstream, that's great. But gays should not grow up alienated just for us to alienate each other. It's too predictable, like any other cycle of abuse. Plus, the conformist, competitive notion that by "toning down" we are "growing up" ultimately blunts the radical edge of what it is to be queer; it truncates our colorful journey of identity. Said another way, it's like living in West Hollywood and working a gay job by day and working it in the gay nightlife, wearing delicate shiny shirts picked from up the gay dry cleaners, yet coquettishly left unbuttoned to reveal the pec implants purchased from a gay surgeon and shown off by prancing around the gay-owned-and-operated theater hopped up on gay health clinic steroids and wheat grass purchased from the friendly gay boy who's new to the city, and impressed by the monstrous SUV purchased from a gay car dealership with its rainbow-striped bumper sticker that says "Celebrate Diversity." Then logging on to the local Gay.com listings and describing yourself as "straight-acting." Let me make myself clear. This is not a campaign for everyone to be like me. That'd be a total yawn. Instead, this narrative is about praise for the prancy boys. Granted, there's undecided gender-fucks, dagger dykes, faux-mos, po-mos, FTMs, fisting-top daddies, and lezzie looners who also need props for broadening the sexual spectrum, but they're telling their own stories. The Cliff's Notes of me and mine are this: the only moments I feel alive are when I'm just being myself - not some stiff-necked temp masquerading as normal in the workplace, not some insecure gay boy aspiring to be an overpumped circuit queen, not some comic book version of swank WeHo living. If that's considered a political act in the homogenized world of twenty-first century homosexuals, then so be it. — excerpt of "Praise For The Prancy Boys," by Clint Catalyst appears in first edition (ISBN # 1-932360-56-5)

Light. Space. Light and space without time, I think, for this is a country with only the slightest traces of human history. In the doctrine of the geologists with their scheme of ages, eons and epochs all is flux, as Heraclitus taught, but from the mortally human point of view the landscape of the Colorado is like a section of eternity- timeless. In all my years in the canyon country I have yet see a rock fall, of its own volition, so to speak, aside from floods. To convince myself of the reality of change and therefore time I will sometimes push a stone over the edge of a cliff and watch it descend and wait- lighting my pipe- for the report of its impact and disintegration to return. Doing my bit to help, of course, aiding natural processes and verifying the hypotheses of geological morphology. But am not entirely convinced.

The allure of unthinking animal bliss is powerful; it always calls to us, in the same way as the edge of a cliff or the waves of the ocean: Jump. It is a necessary part of our natures, full of delight and danger in equal measure. Yet to the mind trained in language, taught to spy subtleties and take joy in them, such crude, baser matters can pale after a while. But there lies grave peril also: The propensity to empathize with pain expressed in words encourages a poet to avoid the real thing, and a too-passionate love of books can mew one in a cloister, putting up walls where there should be free range. I decided long ago—to keep myself sane amongst the illiterate and unthinking—that there would be poetry in my life. But there would also be fucking. I would have them both, but follow the sage advice of modern beer commercials and enjoy responsibly.

Breath (from the book Blue Bridge) Whispering to myself With every step I take, Trying out names, for I know There is something yet to be called ….. I know it, something up ahead Just around the bend Or over the rise – A bird taking to the sky From the edge of a jagged cliff – A bird floating outwards In silence ……. A silence Waiting for a footstep To crunch on stones, For a voice to fling upward Through sharp sunlight With a name…… calling Before the bird could call Before the bird called. Oh the bird was there alright And sure it took flight When it heard me approach But it broke my heart With a mighty croak! So I’m sitting here playing With a purple flower Slender stem, no leaves Purple fizz – And it’s quiet again. I am still I am nothing And the hill Is a long, long slope Down, down, down to the sea Far below. I could roll I could run I could scream But I am nothing. A cool wind blows And the light is naked and nameless And the rocks are faces of angels And the bird in the sky wheels And cries to forget the earth And its ancient bones – Oh, sensual pain – Wings…. Wings…. Wings, Singing wings. If only I could begin To describe the emptiness Which fills me to the brim With new breath I might almost lose my name And take instead a feather for my soul.

persistent, flowing through fallen shadows, excavating tunnels, drilling silences, insisting, running under my pillow, brushing past my temples, covering my eyelids with another, intangible skin made of air, its wandering nations, its drowsy tribes migrate through the provinces of my body, it crosses, re-crosses under the bridges of my bones, slips into my left ear, spills out from my right, climbs the nape of my neck, turns and turns in my skull, wanders across the terrace of my forehead, conjures visions, scatters them, erases my thoughts one by one with hands of unwetting water, it evaporates them, black surge, tide of pulse-beats, murmur of water groping forward repeating the same meaningless syllable, I hear its sleepwalking delirium losing itself in serpentine galleries of echoes, it comes back, drifts off, comes back, endlessly flings itself off the edges of my cliffs, and I don’t stop falling and I fall

There were worse things than death. There would be a leap and a moment suspended, then a long hopeless curve to the rocks and river below. They would fall like leaves between clouds of swifts and then be washed away by the thundering rapids. Bramble clung to that thought. If their bodies washed away then there could be no identification, no danger of reprisals on her family. She hung on tighter. The roan's hindquarters bunched under her and they were in the air. It was like she had imagined: the leap, and then the moment suspended in air that seemed to last forever. Below her the swifts boiled up through the river mist, swerving and swooping, while she and the roan seemed to stay frozen above them. Bramble felt, like a rush of air, the presence of the gods surround her. The shock made her lose her balance and begin to slide sideways. She felt herself falling. With an impossible flick of both legs, the roan shrugged her back onto his shoulders. Then the long curve downward and she braced herself to see the cliffs rushing past as they fell. Time to die. Instead she felt a thumping jolt that flung her from the roan's back and tossed her among the rocks at the cliff's edge on the other side. On the other side. Her sight cleared, although the light still seemed dim. Her hearing came back a little. On the other side of the abyss a jumble of men and hounds were milling, shouting, astonished and very angry. "You can't do that!" one yelled. "It's impossible!" "Well, he shagging did it!" another said. "Can't be impossible!" "Head for the bridge!" Beck shouted. "We can still get him! I want that horse!

Always lost, always striking out in the wrong direction, always going around in circles. You have suffered from a life-long inability to orient yourself in space, and even in New York, the easiest of cities to negotiate, the city where you have spent the better part of your adulthood, you often run into trouble. Whenever you take the subway from Brooklyn to Manhattan (assuming you have boarded the correct train and are not traveling deeper into Brooklyn), you make a special point to stop for a moment to get your bearings once you have climbed the stairs to the street, and still you will head north instead of south, go east instead of west, and even when you try to outsmart yourself, knowing that your handicap will set you going the wrong way and therefore, to rectify the error, you do the opposite of what you were intending to do, go left instead of right, go right instead of left, and still you find yourself moving in the wrong direction, no matter how many adjustments you have made. Forget tramping alone in the woods. You are hopelessly lost within minutes, and even indoors, whenever you find yourself in an unfamiliar building, you will walk down the wrong corridor or take the wrong elevator, not to speak of smaller enclosed spaces such as restaurants, for whenever you go to the men’s room in a restaurant that has more than one dining area, you will inevitably make a wrong turn on your way back and wind up spending several minutes searching for your table. Most other people, your wife included, with her unerring inner compass, seem to be able to get around without difficulty. They know where they are, where they have been, and where they are going, but you know nothing, you are forever lost in the moment, in the void of each successive moment that engulfs you, with no idea where true north is, since the four cardinal points do not exist for you, have never existed for you. A minor infirmity until now, with no dramatic consequences to speak of, but that doesn’t mean a day won’t come when you accidentally walk off the edge of a cliff.