Contour Quotes

Love is not the absence of logic but logic examined and recalculated heated and curved to fit inside the contours of the heart

Choosing to be with you, isn't a difficult decision, Jacqueline...It's easy. Incredibly easy.

You're full of contradictions, Ms. Wallace." I looked up at him and arched a brow. "I'm a girl. That's part of the job description, Mr. Maxfield.

Words are never 'only words'; they matter because they define the contours of what we can do.

He knew me in all the ways that truly mattered: the shape of my fears, the contours of my dreams.

The truth was, he now belonged only to my past, and it was time I begin to accept it, as much as it hurt to do so.

I wanted to tell you that I just--I miss you. And maybe that sounds ridiculous--like we barely know each other, but between the emails and texts and... everything else, I felt like we did. Like we do. and I miss--I don't know how else to say it--I miss both of you.

The mold in which a key is made would be a strange thing, if you had never seen a key: and the key itself a strange thing if you had never seen a lock. Your soul has a curious shape because it is a hollow made to fit a particular swelling in the infinite contours of the divine substance, or a key to unlock one of the doors in the house with many mansions. Your place in heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it -- made for it stitch by stitch as a glove is made for a hand.

As for being somewhere you're not supposed to be--Maybe you're here for a reason, or there is no reason.

The night we met—I'm not like that guy." His jaw was rigid. "I know tha—" He placed a finger over my lips, his expression softening. "So I don't want you to feel pressured. Or overpowered. But I do, absolutely, want to kiss you right now. Badly.

People rarely said what they thought, or revealed how they felt. No one was honest.

If someone had asked, "How does this compare to kissing Kennedy?" I would have answered, "Who?

sometimes, how a situation is perceived carries more weight than the reality of the matter.

The type of human being we prefer reveals the contours of our heart.

It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them.

He stuck the pencil over his ear, looking unconvinced. "Mmm. What position would you be the most comfortable for you?" I couldn't say aloud the answers that popped into my head at that question, but the flush that spread across my face like wildfire gave me away. He caught his lower lip in his teeth, and I was sure it was to contain a laugh. Most comfortable position? What about with my head stuck under a pillow?

Bonus: I now knew what Erin meant by lickable abs.

Sisters in solidarity and all that shit.

Lucas: I wanted to talk to you after class, but you disappeared. Me: I have another class right after. One of those profs who stops talking, stares at you and waits until you get to your seat if you're late. Lucas: I would probably just walk to my seat even slower. ;)

Ugh! Erin. You have a one-track mind." She smiled deviously. "I prefer to think of it as target-driven.

He brushed my tears from my face. "How did I find you?

Please touch me. I need you to touch me.

His hands reached for me, gripping my hipbones and pulling me forward. he stared down at me, his voice low. "There are some things I will make time for, Jacqueline.

What I can't do anywhere is be with you.

Choosing to be with you isn't a difficult decision, Jacqueline," he breathed, pulling back one final time to stare into my eyes. "It's easy. Incredibly easy.

Unfortunately, the coughing drew her attention. "Are you dying or something?" she asked, affecting a perfect sneer as I shook my head. "Well, hacking up a lung out in public isn't all that attractive--just sayin'." My face flamed, but then Benji leaned up and spoke around me. "Um, giving half the class an exhaustive summary every Monday morning--in lurid detail--of how much of an alcoholic skank you are? Isn't all that attractive either. Just sayin'.

The way he kissed me felt like a brand. Like he was tattooing himself under my skin.

So when do we get to the junk-kicking?

It was strange learning the contours of another’s loneliness. You could never know it all at once; like stepping inside a dark cave, you felt along the walls, bumped into jagged edges.

He took one of my hands in his, and I brought the other to his face, wondering how his eyes could look like chipped ice and still warm me to my core.

Too much quiet left me depressed and consuming condiments for meals.

Close your eyes and picture it. Can you see it?" I nod, eyes closed. "Imagine it right there before you. See its texture, shape, and color—got it?" I smile, holding the image in my head. "Good. Now reach out and touch it. Feel its contours with the tips of your fingers, cradle its weight in the palms of your hands, then combine all of your senses—sight, touch, smell, taste—can you taste it?" I bite my lip and suppress a giggle. "Perfect. Now combine that with feeling. Believe it exists right before you. Feel it, see it, touch it, taste it, accept it, manifest it!" he says. So I do. I do all of those things. And when he groans, I open my eyes to see for myself. "Ever." He shakes his head. "You were supposed to think of an orange. This isn't even close." "Nope, nothing fruity about him." I laugh, smiling ateach of my Damens—the replica I manifested before me, and the flesh and blood version beside me. Both of them equally tall, dark, and so devastatingly handsome they hardly seem real.

Erin was right. Apologies could come too late.

A world grows up around me. Am I shaping it, or do its predetermined contours guide my hand?

I lost myself so entirely in charting the contours of my love for you that there wasn't any room for tracking time. There wasn't any room to examine the past or the future, there was only the eternal now.

The freedom I want is located in a world where we wouldn't need to love women, or even monitor our feelings about women as meaningful—in which we wouldn't need to parse the contours of female worth and liberation by paying meticulous personal attention to any of this at all.

His earlier hesitation gone, he removed the last scraps of fabric we were wearing, fixed the condom in place, kissed me fiercely and rocked into me. Had this been Kennedy, it would have been over in a few minutes. My last coherent thought, as Lucas took his time kissing and touching every part of me he could reach and my body arched into his, was Oh... so this is what all the fuss is about.

While Daniel disappeared into his room, probably to limn the contours of some exquisite constellation of philosophical nonsense for his internship applications and gasp in the throes of his overachieving OCDness.

He was lovable the way a child is lovable, and he was capable of returning love with a childlike purity. If love is nevertheless excluded from his work, it's because he never quite felt that he deserved to receive it. He was a lifelong prisoner on the island of himself. What looked like gentle contours from a distance were in fact sheer cliffs. Sometimes only a little of him was crazy, sometimes nearly all of him, but, as an adult, he was never entirely not crazy. What he'd seen of his id while trying to escape his island prison by way of drugs and alcohol, only to find himself even more imprisoned by addiction, seems never to have ceased to be corrosive of his belief in his lovability. Even after he got clean, even decades after his late-adolescent suicide attempt, even after his slow and heroic construction of a life for himself, he felt undeserving. And this feeling was intertwined, ultimately to the point of indistinguishability, with the thought of suicide, which was the one sure way out of his imprisonment; surer than addiction, surer than fiction, and surer, finally, than love.

Maybe I'm exactly where I should be after all.

I'm trying to protect you. From myself. I don't do..." he swung a finger back and forth between us"...this.

A word of advice, though. This won't be the last time you have to deal with something in life that throws you off your game. In future courses, as well as in the real world--such as it is--professors and employers won't always be accommodating. We all have to--what's my daughter's terminology--suck it up and deal?

Not stupid. Overly trusting, maybe, but that reflects on his lack of trustworthiness, not on your intelligence.

We talked--recent history only--and Lucas relayed the story of how Francis came to be his roommate. "He showed up at the door one night, demanding to be let in. Napped on the sofa for an hour, then demanded to be let out. It turned into a nightly ritual, with him staying longer and longer, until at some point I realized he'd moved in. He's basically the most brazen squatter ever.

Look - guys are dogs. Women have known this since the beginning of time. Guys don't want to be chased; they chase. So if you're going to catch one, you have to know how to make him chase you.

I could never be afraid of you.

Regular maps have few surprises: their contour lines reveal where the Andes are, and are reasonably clear. More precious, though, are the unpublished maps we make ourselves, of our city, our place, our daily world, our life; those maps of our private world we use every day; here I was happy, in that place I left my coat behind after a party, that is where I met my love; I cried there once, I was heartsore; but felt better round the corner once I saw the hills of Fife across the Forth, things of that sort, our personal memories, that make the private tapestry of our lives.

Moonlight knew no colors and traced the contours of the terrain only very softly. It covered the land a dirty gray, strangling life all night long. This world molded in lead, where nothing moved but the wind that fell sometimes like a shadow over the gray forests, and where nothing lived but the scent of the naked earth, was the only world he accepted, for it was much like the world of his soul.

The planet is shaped by the sheer amazing force of human want, which has changed everything, the forests, the poles, the reservoirs, the glaciers, the rivers, the seas, the mountains, the coastlines, the skies, a planet contoured and landscaped by want.

Chivalry isn't really dead you know." "Oh?" "Nah. That guy's just an asshole.

Everyone isn’t logical. Everything doesn’t make sense in the end. Sometimes you have to forget about explanations or excuses and leave people and places behind, because otherwise they will drag you straight down.

The difference between a path and a road is not only the obvious one. A path is little more than a habit that comes with knowledge of a place. It is a sort of ritual of familiarity. As a form, it is a form of contact with a known landscape. It is not destructive. It is the perfect adaptation, through experience and familiarity, of movement to place; it obeys the natural contours; such obstacles as it meets it goes around.

His jaw clenched. "Okay, so I guess trying to let you down easy was a bad idea--" "This is your idea of letting me down easy? Breaking up with me so you can screw other girls? Without feeling guilty? Are you serious?" "As a heart attack." The last thing I thought before I picked up my econ textbook and hurled it at him: How can he use such a piece-of-shit cliche in a moment like this?

No matter what happened to any individual person, life was going on elsewhere. The first time Kennedy kissed me, it stood to reason that at the same time, other people were splitting up. And the night Kennedy broke my heart, somewhere--maybe right there in my dorm, other people were falling in love.

It was as though he didn't exist, and then suddenly, he was everywhere.

He's already chasing you. Now all you have to do is keep running. Just not too fast.

Really, he could have just punched me in the stomach, because my brain refused to comprehend the words he was saying. A physical assault, it might have understood.

Damn Kennedy. Damn him, damn him. It would serve him right to see me with someone like Lucas. Someone so different, but equally hot. More so, if I started calculating details.

I'm going to arrange you, if that's okay?" I swallowed. "Uh... sure." My hands were clutched to my ribcage, my shoulders hunched almost to my ears. What, this isn't how you want me positioned?

We live in a world with a lot of insecure, jealous people. Some of them are our best friends. They are blood relatives. Failure terrifies them. So does our success. Because when we transcend what we once thought possible, push our limits, and become more, our light reflects off all the walls they’ve built up around them. Your light enables them to see the contours of their own prison, their own self-limitations. But if they are truly the great people you always believed them to be, their jealousy will evolve, and soon their imagination might hop its fence, and it will be their turn to change for the better.

Your father is Dr. Lucas--one of the foremost minds in modern economics--and you're studying art? What the hell are you going to do with a degree in art?" She drew herself up to all five foot two, eyes flashing, and said, "I'm going to make the world more beautiful. What are you going to do? Make money?

I'm gonna make that asshole gnaw his own hand off that night, dammit.

I'd basically described myself: a quiet, studious bookworm who would go to bed at a decent hour. A non-partier who wouldn't bring a parade of boys through our room, or make it the floor headquarters for beer pong.

I noticed you the first week. Not just because of how pretty you are, though of course, that played into it. It was the way you lean onto your elbows when you 're listening in class, when something catches your interest. And when you laugh, it's never to get attention, it's just-laughter. The way you obssevively tuck your hair behind your ear on the left side, but let the right side fall down like a screen. And when you 're bored, you tap your foot soundlessly and move your fingers on the desktop like you 're playing an instrument. I wanted to sketch you.

Every human body has its optimum weight and contour, which only health and efficiency can establish. Whenever we treat women's bodies as aesthetic objects without function we deform them.

I watched him pull his t-shirt over his head. I could put hin on replay doing that and watch it all day...

Let's go make Chaz wish he was never born." "Oh, Erin. I'm so glad you 're on my side." "Damn right, bitch.

People feel the need to choose sides when a relationship splits—it's human nature.

His breath in my ear, he ran his tongue along the curved edge, sucking the fleshy lobe and my small diamond stud into his mouth, and my eyes drifted closed while I babbled a weak sound of longing.

Ooh, J, he's got ink too." "Just when i didn't think he could get any hotter...

I never wanted you to get hurt, but i wanted to take you from him.

What will you do with them?" "Redo them in charcoal, probably." "And then?" "Tack them to my bedroom wall." Bedroom wall? "Who wouldn't want to wake up to this?

Erin and I spent four hours shopping for dresses and shoes Tuesday night. She was going all out in her intention to make Chaz regret any decision he'd made that didn't include worshipping at her feet.

Alcohol removes inhibitions. It doesn't trigger criminal violence where there was none before.

At times I felt that the universe fabricated from the power of imagination had stronger and more lasting contours than the blurred realm of the flesh-and-blood creatures around me.

Time would not change what I was feeling--or not feeling. I'd had time, and though the ache from his desertion hadn't disappeared, it was decreasing. My future was blurry, yes, but I was beginning to imagine a future when I would no longer miss him at all.

I've been known to slum it and shop in the gag-him-and-bag-him aisles, believe it or not.

...a woman of quite bovine stupidity and potato-like contours...

In their choice of lovers both the male and the female reveal their essential nature. The type of human being we prefer reveals the contours of our heart. Love is an impulse which springs from the most profound depths of our beings, and upon reaching the visible surface of life carries with it an alluvium of shells and seaweed from the inner abyss. A skilled naturalist, by filing these materials, can reconstruct the oceanic depths from which they have been uprooted.

I took a breath and blurted everything out before I was too chickenshit to say any of it. “I wanted to tell you that I just—I miss you. And maybe that sounds ridiculous—like we barely know each other, but between the emails and texts and… everything else, I felt like we did. Like we do. And I miss—I don’t know how else to say it—I miss both of you.” He swallowed, closing his eyes and inhaling slowly. I knew he would be all rational and do-the-right-thing and he would push me away again, and I was determined not to give him that chance. But then his eyes flashed open and he said, “Fuck it,” pushing me against the door, slamming his forearms on either side of my head and kissing me more forcefully than I’d ever been kissed

But why?" "You heard the pay, right? And also, to be near you." Thumbing a tear from my cheek, he added, "Mostly, to be near you.

Say stop, whenever you want to stop. Understand?" I nodded. "Do you want to stop now?" My head moved back and forth to the pillow. "Thank God.

Woman, if i was straight, i would steal you from him so hard.

I breathed him in, closing my mouth tight and inhaling the scent of him through my nose. I felt sheltered by him. Safe.

It has been my face. It's got older still, or course, but less, comparatively, than it would otherwise have done. It's scored with deep, dry wrinkles, the skin is cracked. But my face hasn't collapsed, as some with fine feature have done. It's kept the same contours, but its substance has been laid waste. I have a face laid waste.

Stay here tonight, Jacqueline. I need to keep you here, at least tonight. Please.

I want to see your tattoos." "You do, huh?

Ah, crap. I forgot what my hands look like after drawing. You may have little gray marks...everywhere.

Not. Your. Fault." I nodded again, holding onto his words like they were redemption.

This ink will make your skin yours again. Maybe someday, you'll see that your skin isn't you. It's just what houses you while you're here.

There is an internal landscape, a geography of the soul; we search for its outlines all our lives. Those who are lucky enough to find it ease like water over a stone, onto its fluid contours, and are home. Some find it in the place of their birth; others may leave a seaside town, parched, and find themselves refreshed in the desert. There are those born in rolling countryside who are really only at ease in the intense and busy loneliness of the city. For some, the search is for the imprint of another; a child or a mother, a grandfather or a brother, a lover, a husband, a wife, or a foe. We may go through our lives happy or unhappy, successful or unfulfilled, loved or unloved, without ever standing cold with the shock of recognition, without ever feeling the agony as the twisted iron in our soul unlocks itself and we slip at last into place.

Reality never changes. Only our recollections of it do. Whenever a moment passes, we pass along with it into the realm of memory. And in that realm, geometries change. Contours shift, shades lighten, objectivities dissolve. Memory becomes what we need it to be.

New beginnings are often disguised as painful endings ~ Lao Tzu.

I've developed contours for his elbows and knees and bum, and nobody else quite fits into me in quite the same way

As we lay in the semi-dark hours later, we faced each other, sharing his pillow. I'd never felt more connected to anyone.

El amor no es la ausencia de la lógica Pero la lógica examinada y recalculada Calentada y curvada para adaptarse Dentro de los contornos del corazón.

I’m wrapped in you. Melting in your silhouette and becoming one, a strange contour of love, flowing with the wind.

It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them. Thus you remember them as they actually are, while in a motor car only a high hill impresses you, and you have no such accurate remembrance of country you have driven through as you gain by riding a bicycle.

So Buck can enjoy sitting in a cell contemplating how he blew up his life. That dickwad hurt two people sitting at this table. And you’re worried about who’ll look bad if they tell? Screw that. Dean and D.J. and Kennedy and every frat boy on this campus can all go fuck themselves. Are we sisters or not?

Rather than raising his voice like everyone else, he leaned close to my ear and asked, "Dance with me?" I felt his warm breath and inhale the scent of his aftershave -something basic and male.

Some of us can begin to heal the damage people have done to us by escaping the situation, but some of us need more than that. Tattoos make statements that need to be made. Or hide things that are no one's business. Your scars are battle wounds, but you don't see them that way. Yet.

The last time someone dried my hair for me was in sixth grade, when i broke my arm." "How did you break it?" "I fell out of a tree." "You fell out of a tree?" "I think there was a boy and a dare involved." "Ah.

Almost every time i saw you, you were with him. But one day, you walked up to the building alone. I was holding the door for several girls in front of you, and i waited for you to catch up. When you reached me, you look pleased, and a little surprised. Unlike the others, you didn't expect the door to be held for you by some random guy. You smiled up at me and said, 'Thank you.' That was the last straw. I prayed you 'd never come to a session, and not with him. I didn't want you to know i was the tutor.

Her companion, also in black, appeared as a well-formed young woman about 18, completely possessed of that ephemeral precious essence youth, which is itself beauty, irrespective of complexion or contour.

LUCAS: I've done a couple from memory but they aren't the same. Can't quite get the shape of your jaw. The line of your neck. And your lips. I need to spend more time staring at them and less time tasting them. ME: I can't say i agree with that notion. LUCAS: More of both, then.

Luck could be earned and created. It could be discovered. It could be regained. After all - I'd found this girl. I'd found my future. I'd found forgiveness. My mother would have been happy for me...

I'd always disparaged the games people played in pursuit of love--or the next hook up. The whole thing was a competition to see who could get how far, and I could never figure out if there was more luck or skill involved, or some unknowable combination of the two. People rarely said what they thought, or revealed how they felt. No one was honest.

I'm not blaming you-or her. Neither of you asked for what he did-there's no such thing as asking for it. That's a fucking lie argued by psychopaths and dumbasses. Okay?

Did that hurt? On your lip?" "Not too much. I said a few choice four-letter words, though.

Minus my relationship with Kennedy, I had no automatic invitation to Greek Parties or events, though Chaz and Erin could invite me to some stuff since I fell under the heading of acceptable things to bring to any party: alcohol and girls. Awesome. I'd gone from independent girlfriend to party paraphernalia.

It's not that i don't want you. I lied, earlier, when i said i was protecting you. I'm protecting myself. I don't want to be your rebound, Jacqueline." "Then why are you assuming that role? It's not what i want, either." "What am i gonna do with you?" "I can think of a couple things.

I take it this is one of the ones crushing on you." "What? They all crush on me. I'm a hot college girl, remember?" I laughed and his eyes burned into mine. He leaned in close and whispered into my ear. "So hot. Now you've got me thinking what you looked like this morning, when i woke up with you in my arms, in my bed. Would it be too greedy to ask you to stay tonight, too?" "I was afraid you weren't going to ask.

Now don't laugh 'cause I just might be...the soft curve in your hardline. (from the song "Hardliners" by Holcombe Waller)

But remember that words are signals, counters. They are not immortal. And it can happen - to use an image you'll understand - it can happen that a civilisation can be imprisoned in a linguistic contour which no longer matches the landscape of... fact.

Over the past three years, we'd become each other's habit. And though he'd broken his habit of me when he walked away, I'd not broken my habit of him.

His blood? From his nose?" I nodded, disgusted. "Good girl." His arms slid around me again. "God, you 're so fucking amazing.

How did you know??? I'm Erin. I know all. ;)

I wanted to put on earphones and plug into her and know what she was hearing when her fingers performed.

The young can be very lovely, but the faces of the old can be truly beautiful. Every line and fold, every contour and wrinkle of Sister Monica Joan's fine white skin revealed her character, strength, courage, humanity and irrepressible humour.

oh... so this is what all the fuss is about.

He was in a slow-motion mood-one of my favorites, though it meant i'd be driven crazy before we were done.

Landon Loucas Maxfield was asleep on his sofa. With me.

She had no startling brilliancy of beauty, no pearly whiteness, no radiant carnation. She had not the majestic contour that rivets attention, demands instant wonder, and then disappoints by the coldness of its charms. You might pass Eleanor Harding in the street without notice, but you could hardly pass an evening with her and not lose your heart.

Keep looking at me,” she said, laughing as though we were having an amusing conversation. “He’s staring at you. And I mean staring. That boy is undressing you with his eyes. Can you feel it?” Her expression was triumphant. Could I feel his stare? I can now, thanks, I thought.

I was holding the door for several girls in front of you, and I waited for you to catch up. When you reached me, you looked pleased, and a little surprised. Unlike the others, you didn't expect the door to be held for you by some random guy. You smiled up at me and said, 'Thank you.

He stared down at me, and i examined his beautiful eyes up close, something i'd never tire of doing.

Wow, that sounds total stalker." Or totally hot. God.

Why don't you go get in bed?" I stood, laying my hand on his chest and staring up at him. "Is that a dare?" He laid one hand over mine and pull me closer with the other. Leaning down, he kissed me gently. "It absolutely is. No falling out of it allowed, though.

You have a freckle here," he whispered, sweeping his tongue over a spot just under my jaw. "It drives me crazy every time you 're above me. I just want to do this..." The jentle draw of his mouth pushed me over the edge, and my knees tightened around his hips as i rocked against him.

I dreamed about the future because that's what people persuade you to do when you're a kid, but that's the biggest lie of all--that you can plan. Reality is, you have no fucking clue what's coming and neither do they.

I've started researching online journals for the project. Thanks for decoding Dr. Heller's notes before sending them to me. If you'd have forwarded them to me without a translation, I'd be searching for a tall building/overpass/water tower from which to yell "goodbye cruel world.

Whenever I appeared to have won an argument, Mom would say something like, 'Even broken clocks are right twice a day.

My last coherent thought, as Lucas took his time kissing and touching every part of me he could reach and my body arched into his, was: oh... so this is what all the fuss is about.

What would happen if a man's face could adequately express his suffering, if his entire inner agony would be objectified in his facial expression? Could we still communicate? Wouldn't we then cover our faces with our hands while talking? Life would really be impossible if the infinitude of feelings we harbor within ourselves would be fully expressed in the lines of our face. Nobody would dare look at himself in the mirror, because a grotesque, tragic image would mix in the contours of his face with stains and traces of blood, wounds which cannot be healed, and unstoppable streams of tears. I would experience a kind of voluptuous awe if I could see a volcano of blood, eruptions as red as fire and as burning as despair, burst into the comfortable and superficial harmony of everyday life, or if I could see all our hidden wounds open, making of us a bloody eruption forever. Only then would be truly understand and appreciate the advantages of loneliness, which silences our suffering and makes it inaccessible. The venom drawn out from suffering would be enough to poison the whole world in a bloody eruption, bursting out of the volcano of our being. There is so much venom, so much poison, in suffering!

books, i think, are a different kind of time machine. instead of reminding you of a lost world, they create one for you. more personal, more intimate-unlike movies, say, the world you experience while reading a book has been lived and envisioned entirely from the INSIDE, and its contours are yours alone.

But not you, O girl, nor yet his mother, stretched his eyebrows so fierce with expectation. Not for your mouth, you who hold him now, did his lips ripen into these fervent contours. Do you really think your quiet footsteps could have so convulsed him, you who move like dawn wind? True, you startled his heart; but older terrors rushed into him with that first jolt to his emotions. Call him . . . you'll never quite retrieve him from those dark consorts. Yes, he wants to, he escapes; relieved, he makes a home in your familiar heart, takes root there and begins himself anew. But did he ever begin himself?

Visiting his neighbours’ apartments, he would find himself physically repelled by the contours of an award-winning coffee-pot, by the well-modulated colour schemes, by the good taste and intelligence that, Midas-like, had transformed everything in these apartments into an ideal marriage of function and design.

But girls willing to share your bed don't equal girls willing to put up with your random crap moods, listen to your exhaustive legal opinions, or support your life's goals the way someone who loves you would.

(Decadent style) is ingenious, complicated, learned, full of shades of meaning and research, always pushing further the limits of language... forcing itself to express in thought that which is most ineffable, and in form the vaguest and most fleeting contours; listening that it may translate them to the subtle confidences of the neuropath, to the avowals of aging and depraved passion, and to the singular hallucinations of the fixed idea verging on madness... In opposition to the classic style, it admits of shading, and these shadows teem and swarm with the larvae of superstitions, the haggard phantoms of insomnia, nocturnal terrors, remorse which starts and turns back at the slightest noise, monstrous dreams stayed only by impotence, obscure phantasies at which daylight would stand amazed, and all that the soul conceals of the dark, the unformed, and the vaguely horrible, in its deepest and furthest recesses.

Wait." "Stop?" I bit my lip and nodded. "Stop everything, or just go no further?" "Just...just no further." "Done." He gathered me into his arms and kissed me, one hand tangled in my hair and the other one caressing down my back, our hearts pulsing out a cadence that the musician in me translated into a concert of lust.

Travel does what good novelists also do to the life of everyday, placing it like a picture in a frame or a gem in its setting, so that the intrinsic qualities are made more clear. Travel does this with the very stuff that everyday life is made of, giving to it the sharp contour and meaning of art.

My body cheerfully informed me that he felt really good pressed against me like that, all hard muscles and smooth contours and ominous bulges. My body liked the air of barely leashed strength and caged mayhem he was giving off. My body thought he smelled really good, like heat and coffee and electricity. My body was going to get me killed.

Nobody would dare look at himself in the mirror, because a grotesque, tragic image would mix in the contours of his face with stains and traces of blood, wounds which cannot be healed, and unstoppable streams of tears. I would experience a kind of voluptuous awe if I could see a volcano of blood, eruptions as red as fire and as burning as despair, burst into the midst of the comfortable and superficial harmony of everyday life, or if I could see all our hidden wounds open, making of us a bloody eruption forever. Only then would we truly understand and appreciate the advantage of loneliness, which silences our suffering and makes it inaccessible. The venom drawn out from suffering would be enough to poison the whole world in a bloody eruption, bursting out of the volcano of our being. There is so much venom, so much poison, in suffering!

He laughed, and the sound reduced the pain of every sore place on my body to the dullest ache.

Jackie?" "It wasn't your fault.

Erin: We get to beat the shit outta guys in those big puffy suits!!! I’ve always wanted to really kick the crap outta some guy’s nuts. Now I can do it guilt-free! Me: You’re a sick girl. Erin: Guilty as charged. :)

my final piece We’re born into the world As just one small piece to the puzzle That makes up an entire life. It’s up to us throughout our years, to find all of our pieces that fit. The pieces that connect who we are To who we were To who we’ll one day be. Sometimes pieces will almost fit. They’ll feel right. We’ll carry them around for a while, Hoping they’ll change shape. Hoping they’ll conform to our puzzle. But they won’t. We’ll eventually have to let them go. To find the puzzle that is their home. Sometimes pieces won’t fit at all. No matter how much we want them to. We’ll shove them. We’ll bend them. We’ll break them. But what isn’t meant to be, won’t be. Those are the hardest pieces of all to accept. The pieces of our puzzle That just don’t belong. But occasionally . . . Not very often at all, If we’re lucky, If we pay enough attention, We’ll find a perfect match. The pieces of the puzzle that slide right in The pieces that hug the contours of our own pieces. The pieces that lock to us. The pieces that we lock to. The pieces that fit so well, we can’t tell where our piece begins And that piece ends. Those pieces we call Friends. True loves. Dreams. Passions. Beliefs. Talents. They’re all the pieces that complete our puzzles. They line the edges, Frame the corners, Fill the centers, Those pieces are the pieces that make us who we are. Who we were. Who we’ll one day be. Up until today, When I looked at my own puzzle, I would see a finished piece. I had the edges lined, The corners framed, The center filled. It felt like it was complete. All the pieces were there. I had everything I wanted. Everything I needed. Everything I dreamt of. But up until today, I realized I had collected all but one piece. The most vital piece. The piece that completes the picture. The piece that completes my whole life. I held this girl in my arms She wrapped her tiny fingers around mine. It was then that I realized She was the fusion. The glue. The cement that bound all my pieces together. The piece that seals my puzzle. The piece that completes my life. The element that makes me who I am. Who I was. Who I’ll one day be. You, baby girl. You’re my final piece.

At times I think of human relationships as something soft like sand or water, and by pouring them into particular vessels we give them shape. So a mother’s relationship with her daughter is poured into a vessel marked ‘mother and child’, and the relationship takes the contours of its container and is held inside there, for better or worse. Maybe some unhappy friends would have been perfectly contented as sisters, or married couples as parents and children, who knows. But what would it be like to form a relationship with no preordained shape of any kind? Just to pour the water out and let it fall. I suppose it would take no shape, and run off in all directions.

The amusement fled from Royce's face and with a groan he pulled her roughly against his chest, crushing her to him. "Jenny," he whispered hoarsely, burying his face in her fragrant hair. "Jenny, I love you." She melted against him, molding her body to the rigid contours of his, offering her lips up for his fierce, devouring kiss, then she took his face between both her hands. Leaning back slightly against his arm, her melting blue eyes gazing deeply into his, his wife replied in a shaky voice, "I think, my lord, I love you more.

I'm so proud of you. I want you to tell me about it, when you can... and when i can stand to hear it. I'm still too angry right now.." "Okay." "I knew i'd fucked up. I was getting on my bike, coming after you-and then you were running up the driveway. When he tackled you...i wanted to kill him. I think if Charles hadn't stopped me, i would have killed him.

This girl wasn’t tapping her fingers restlessly, though. Her movements were methodical. Synchronized. Sitting far enough to the left of her to study her profile, I watched her chin bob, so subtly it was almost undetectable – and at some point, I realized that when her expression was remote and her fingers were moving, she was hearing music. She was playing music. It was the most magical thing I’d ever seen anyone do.

She’d conjured love in the heart of a man whose soul had been frozen for years, anesthetized by too much pain and guilt to bear.

You're so beautiful.

I do, absolutely, want to kiss you right now. Badly.

It’s easy to look at the contours of a forest and feel a bone deep love for nature. It’s less easy to remember that the contours of your own body represent the exact same nature. The pathways of your mind. Your dreams, dark and strange as sprouts curling beneath a flat rock. Your regret, bitter as the citrus rot of old cut grass. It’s the same as the nature you make time to love. That you practice loving. The forest. The meadow. The sweeping arm of a galaxy. You are as natural as any postcard landscape and deserve the same love.

A certain amount of reverie is good, like a narcotic in discreet doses. It soothes the fever, occasionally high, of the brain at work, and produces in the mind a soft, fresh vapor that corrects the all too angular contours of pure thought, fills up the gaps and intervals here and there, binds them together, and dulls the sharp corners of ideas. But too much reverie submerges and drowns. Thought is the labor of the intellect, reverie it's pleasure. To replace thought with reverie is to confound poison with nourishment.

I used to think when I was younger and writing that each idea had a certain shape and when I started to study Greek and I found the word morphe it was for me just the right word for that, unlike the word shape in English which falls a bit short morphe in greek means the sort of plastic contours that an idea has inside your all your senses when you grasp it the first moment and it always seemed to me that a work should play out that same contour in its form. So I can’t start writing something down til I get a sense of that, that morphe. And then it unfolds, I wouldn’t say naturally, but it unfolds gropingly by keeping only to the contours of that form whatever it is.

I confront the city with my body; my legs measure the length of the arcade and the width of the square; my gaze unconsciously projects my body onto the facade of the cathedral, where it roams over the mouldings and contours, sensing the size of recesses and projections; my body weight meets the mass of the cathedral door, and my hand grasps the door pull as I enter the dark void behind. I experience myself in the city, and the city exists through my embodied experience. The city and my body supplement and define each other. I dwell in the city and the city dwells in me.

I kept my eyes open on the ride home. Peeking over Lucas's shoulder, i watched the scenery fly by-and it was exhilarating, not frightening. I trusted him. I had since that first night, when i let him drive me home.

She shuddered. “What is it with slobbery kissers? Are they trying to drown us in spit? I mean, Jesus, swallow every now and then.

Your scars are battle wounds, but you don’t see them that way.

there's not a boy on the planet worth this amount of angst. I know; I used to be one

ME: You 're a sick girl. ERIN: Guilty as charged. :)

I thought about texting Lucas, but what would i say? That i'd tossed and turned all night, thinking of his hands on me?

Rome was mud and smoky skies; the rank smell of the Tiber and the exotically spiced cooking fires of a hundred different nationalities. Rome was white marble and gilding and heady perfumes; the blare of trumpets and the shrieking of market-women and the eternal, sub-aural hum of more people, speaking more languages than Gaius had ever imagined existed, crammed together on seven hills whose contours had long ago disappeared beneath this encrustation if humanity. Rome was the pulsing heart of the world.

We were encouraged to propose safetyprevention suggestions, and write them all down— locking doors, walking or exercising with a friend, wearing shoes that don’t hinder running. Erin’s suggestion of “Avoid assholes” was popular.

I want it to be better than okay. You deserve better than okay.

I had become Harry Potter. Except I was thirteen and not magic, and my destiny, whatever it was, held no profound purpose.

I was sure you 'd dropped the class, which made me selfishly ecstatic. Without even knowing i was doing it, i started looking for you on campus.

First, this is a great job, and i'm excited about it." "Second, i'm ambitious, but i can succeed almost everywhere." "What I can't do anywhere is be with you." "Choosing to be with you isn't a difficult decision, Jacqueline. It's easy. Incredibly easy.

J'ai tant rêvé de toi que tu perds ta réalité. Est-il encore temps d'atteindre ce corps vivant et de baiser sur cette bouche la naissance de la voix qui m'est chère? J'ai tant rêvé de toi que mes bras habitués en étreignant ton ombre à se croiser sur ma poitrine ne se plieraient pas au contour de ton corps, peut-être. Et que, devant l'apparence réelle de ce qui me hante et me gouverne depuis des jours et des années, je deviendrais une ombre sans doute. O balances sentimentales.

Please touch me. I need you to touch me." I didn't have to ask twice. His arms came around me, pulling me onto his lap and cradling me against his chest. "His blood? From his nose?" I nodded, disgusted. "Good girl." His arms slid around me again. "God, you 're so fucking amazing." "I want it off. I want it off." "Yes. Soon." His fingers moved gently over my face. "I'm so sorry, Jacqueline. Jesus Christ, i can't believe i sent you out the door like that. Please forgive me." As he caressed me, i turned my head under his chin, folding into him as small as i could get. "I'm sorry for looking her up. I didn't know-" "Shh, baby...not now. Just let me hold you." He pulled me tighter still after grabbing his jacket from the grass nearby and draping it over me, and we stopped speaking.

I began to wonder whether anything truly existed, whether reality wasn't an unformed and gelatinous substance only half-captured by my senses....If that were true, each of us was living in absolute isolation. The thought terrified me. I was consoled by the idea that I could take that gelatin and mold it to create anything I wanted...At times I felt that the universe fabricated from the power of the imagination had stronger and more lasting contours than the blurred realm of the flesh-and-blood creatures around me.

Lucas was fifteen minutes late to class on Friday, and we had a pop quiz first thing—which he missed. My first thought was how irresponsible it was to miss a quiz… and then I remembered that I missed the midterm. I couldn't exactly point any fingers.

I shrugged. “I guess that guys who’d never do something like that have a hard time believing some other guy would,” I said, but I could see her point. Awareness and apologies were fine and good, but they could come too late.

Admirable, however, as the Paris of the present day appears to you, build up and put together again in imagination the Paris of the fifteenth century; look at the light through that surprising host of steeples, towers, and belfries; pour forth amid the immense city, break against the points of its islands, compress within the arches of the bridges, the current of the Seine, with its large patches of green and yellow, more changeable than a serpent's skin; define clearly the Gothic profile of this old Paris upon an horizon of azure, make its contour float in a wintry fog which clings to its innumerable chimneys; drown it in deep night, and observe the extraordinary play of darkness and light in this sombre labyrinth of buildings; throw into it a ray of moonlight, which shall show its faint outline and cause the huge heads of the towers to stand forth from amid the mist; or revert to that dark picture, touch up with shade the thousand acute angles of the spires and gables, and make them stand out, more jagged than a shark's jaw, upon the copper-coloured sky of evening. Now compare the two.

I had to stop linking every single thing that happened to me with Kennedy. Realization dawned then, that he was still my default. Over the past three years, we’d become each other’s habit. And though he’d broken his habit of me when he walked away, I’d not broken my habit of him. I was still tethering him to my present, to my future. The truth was, he now belonged only to my past, and it was time I began to accept it, as much as it hurt to do so.

Quasida of the Woman Prone" To see you naked is to remember the Earth, the smooth Earth, clean of horses, the Earth without reeds, pure form, closed to the future, confine of silver. To see you naked is to understand the desire of rain that looks for the delicate waist, or the fever of the broad-faced sea that cannot find the light of its cheek. Blood will ring through the bedrooms and will come with flaming swords, but you will not know the hiding places of the violet or the heart of the toad. Your womb is a struggle of roots. Your lips are a dawn without contour. Under the lukewarm roses of the bed the dead men moan, awaiting their return.

Time is like wax, dripping from a candle flame. In the moment, it is molten and falling, with the capability to transform into any shape. Then the moment passes, and the wax hits the tabletop, and solidifies into the shape it will always be. It becomes the past, a solid, single record of what happened, still holding in its wild curves and contours the potential of every shape it could have held. It is impossible, no matter how blessed you are by luck or the government or some remote, invisible deity gently steering your life with hands made of moonlight and wind, it is impossible not to feel a little sad looking at that bit of wax, that bit of the past. It is impossible not to think of all the wild forms that wax now will never take. ... ... But then you remember, I remember, that we are even now in another bit of molten wax. We are in a moment and it is still falling, still volatile, and we will never be anywhere else. We will always be in that most dangerous, most exciting, most possible time of all: the now, where we never can know what shape the next moment will take. Stay tune fore... well, let's just find out together, shall we?

What does it mean that man is a 'social animal? Only that humans need one another in order to define themselves and achieve self-consciousness, in a way that molluscs or earthworms do not. We cannot come to a proper sense of ourselves if there aren't others around to show us what we're like. 'A man can acquire anything in solitude except a character,' wrote Stendhal, suggesting that character has its genesis in the reactions of others to our words and actions. Our selves are fluid and require the contours provided by our neighbours. To feel whole, we need people in the vicinity who know us as well, sometimes better, than we know ourselves.

Every crack is also an opening. When in the midst of great change, it is helpful to remember how a chick is born. From the view of the chick, it is a terrifying struggle. Confined and curled in a dark shell, half-formed, the chick eats all its food and stretches to the contours of its shell. It begins to feel hungry and cramped. Eventually, the chick begins to starve and feels suffocated by the ever-shrinking space of its world. Finally, its own growth begins to crack the shell, and the world as the chick knows it is coming to an end. Its sky is falling. As the chick wriggles through the cracks, it begins to eat its shell. In that moment—growing but fragile, starving and cramped, its world breaking—the chick must feel like it is dying. Yet once everything it has relied on falls away, the chick is born. It doesn't die, but falls into the world.

I didn’t realize I was frozen in place until a classmate shouldered into me, knocking my heavy backpack from my shoulder. “’Scuse me,” he grumbled, his tone more Get out of the way than Sorry I ran into you. As I bent to retrieve my backpack, praying Kennedy and his fangirl hadn’t seen me, a hand grasped the strap and swung the pack up from the floor. I straightened and looked into clear gray-blue eyes. “Chivalry isn’t really dead, you know.

A warm flow of pain was gradually replacing the ice and wood of the anaesthetic in his thawing, still half-dead, abominably martyred mouth. After that, during a few days he was in mourning for an intimate part of himself. It surprised him to realize how fond he had been of his teeth. His tongue, a fat sleek seal, used to flop and slide so happily among the familiar rocks, checking the contours of a battered but still secure kingdom, plunging from cave to cove, climbing this jag, nuzzling that notch, finding a shred of sweet seaweed in the same old cleft; but now not a landmark remained, and all there existed was a great dark wound, a terra incognita of gums which dread and disgust forbade one to investigate. And when the plates were thrust in, it was like a poor fossil skull being fitted with the grinning jaws of a perfect stranger.

There was hardly a touch of earth in her love for Clare. To her sublime trustfulness he was all that goodness could be—knew all that a guide, philosopher, and friend should know. She thought every line in the contour of his person the perfection of masculine beauty, his soul the soul of a saint, his intellect that of a seer. The wisdom of her love for him, as love, sustained her dignity; she seemed to be wearing a crown. The compassion of his love for her, as she saw it, made her lift up her heart to him in devotion. He would sometimes catch her large, worshipful eyes, that had no bottom to them looking at him from their depths, as if she saw something immortal before her.

My mother always pouted that it was actually her paintings and not her charm, her beauty or her sass that made him fall in love with her. He'd always insisted that it was definitely her sass. I knew the truth. He fell for all those things, and when she died, it was like someone had extinguished the sun, and he had nothing left to orbit.

Her shining tresses, divided in two parts, encircle the harmonious contour of her white and delicate cheeks, brilliant in their glow and freshness. Her ebony brows have the form and charm of the bow of Kama, the god of love, and beneath her long silken lashes the purest reflections and a celestial light swim, as in the sacred lakes of Himalaya, in the black pupils of her great clear eyes. Her teeth, fine, equal, and white, glitter between her smiling lips like dewdrops in a passion-flower's half-enveloped breast. Her delicately formed ears, her vermilion hands, her little feet, curved and tender as the lotus-bud, glitter with the brilliancy of the loveliest pearls of Ceylon, the most dazzling diamonds of Golconda. Her narrow and supple waist, which a hand may clasp around, sets forth the outline of her rounded figure and the beauty of her bosom, where youth in its flower displays the wealth of its treasures; and beneath the silken folds of her tunic she seems to have been modelled in pure silver by the godlike hand of Vicvarcarma, the immortal sculptor.

Often, people build stories in their mind which have no basis in the contours of reality. Those which build these images, are building such images which are based on their relatively limited sense of understanding about the particular subject or person. This is a "fill in the blank" reality, which often manifests itself into the hearts and the minds of those who have a "fill in the blank" mindset, not the person with the here said reality. The universe is designed in a way that reflects itself, just like a mirror, showing you exactly who you are to yourself, not who others are. Your largest and most concealed insecurities have their way of presenting themselves to you in a fashion that is relative to your self designed way of communication. This short writing is a reminder that your preconceived notions on a particular subject or person, are a construct of your inner mind and emotional-relational well being and not of others. This is one of the largest fundamental truths in which you must have large insight to carefully watch who and what you massacre with your personal thoughts. Having a keen sense of control on this subject will lead you to enlightenment in many platforms of life.

We've surpassed ourselves now, we're exploring terrain beyond the limits of merely human understanding. Sometimes its contours, even in conventional space, are just too intricate for our brains to track; other times its very axes extend into dimensions inconceivable to minds built to fuck and fight on some prehistoric grassland. So many things constrain us, from so many directions. The most altruistic and sustainable philosophies fail before the brute brain-stem imperative of self-interest. Subtle and elegant equations predict the behavior of the quantum world, but none can explain it. After four thousand years we can't even prove that reality exists beyond the mind of the first-person dreamer. We have such need of intellects greater than our own. But we're not very good at building them.

Describing something is like using it – it destroys; the colours wear off, the corners lose their definition, and in the end what’s been described begins to fade, to disappear. This applies most of all to places. Enormous damage has been done by travel literature – a veritable scourge, an epidemic. Guidebooks have conclusively ruined the greater part of the planet; published in editions numbering in the millions, in many languages, they have debilitated places, pinning them down and naming them, blurring their contours. Even I, in my youthful naiveté, once took a shot at the description of places. But when I would go back to those descriptions later, when I’d try to take a deep breath and allow their intense presence to choke me up all over again, when I’d try to listen in on their murmurings, I was always in for a shock. The truth is terrible: describing is destroying.

One morning I fell to sketching a face: what sort of a face it was to be, I did not care or know. I took a soft black pencil, gave it a broad point, and worked away. Soon I had traced on the paper a broad and prominent forehead and a square lower outline of visage: that contour gave me pleasure; my fingers proceeded actively to fill it with features. Strongly-marked horizontal eyebrows must be traced under that brow; then followed, naturally, a well-defined nose, with a straight ridge and full nostrils; then a flexible-looking mouth, by no means narrow; then a firm chin, with a decided cleft down the middle of it: of course, some black whiskers were wanted, and some jetty hair, tufted on the temples, and waved above the forehead. Now for the eyes: I had left them to the last, because they required the most careful working. I drew them large; I shaped them well: the eyelashes I traced long and sombre; the irids lustrous and large. "Good! but not quite the thing," I thought, as I surveyed the effect: "they want more force and spirit;" and I wrought the shades blacker, that the lights might flash more brilliantly--a happy touch or two secured success. There, I had a friend's face under my gaze; and what did it signify that those young ladies turned their backs on me? I looked at it; I smiled at the speaking likeness: I was absorbed and content. Is that a portrait of some one you know?" asked Eliza, who had approached me unnoticed. I responded that it was merely a fancy head, and hurried it beneath the other sheets. Of course, I lied: it was, in fact, a very faithful representation of Mr. Rochester. But what was that to her, or to any one but myself? Georgiana also advanced to look. The other drawings pleased her much, but she called that 'an ugly man.

Slowly what she composed with the new day was her own focus, to bring together body and mind. This was made with an effort, as if all the dissolutions and dispersions of her self the night before were difficult to reassemble. She was like an actress who must compose a face, an attitude to meet the day. The eyebrow pencil was no mere charcoal emphasis on blond eyebrows, but a design necessary to balance a chaotic asymmetry. Make up and powder were not simply applied to heighten a porcelain texture, to efface the uneven swellings caused by sleep, but to smooth out the sharp furrows designed by nightmares, to reform the contours and blurred surfaces of the cheeks, to erase the contradictions and conflicts which strained the clarity of the face’s lines, disturbing the purity of its forms. She must redesign the face, smooth the anxious brows, separate the crushed eyelashes, wash off the traces of secret interior tears, accentuate the mouth as upon a canvas, so it will hold its luxuriant smile. Inner chaos, like those secret volcanoes which suddenly lift the neat furrows of a peacefully ploughed field, awaited behind all disorders of face, hair, and costume, for a fissure through which to explode. What she saw in the mirror now was a flushed, clear-eyed face, smiling, smooth, beautiful. The multiple acts of composure and artifice had merely dissolved her anxieties; now that she felt prepared to meet the day, her true beauty emerged which had been frayed and marred by anxiety.

I haven't tried this with anyone...signifacant in a long time. It's never worked before." "You haven't had sex before?" "I have. But not with anyone i cared about or...knew. One-time things. That's all." "That's all-ever?" "It's not like they 've been tons of them. There were more before, in high school, than there have been the last three years." "Lucas? I said yes, and i meant it. I want this-as long as you have protection, i mean. I want this, with you. So this is okay. Please don't ask me to say stop." "I want it to be better than okay. You deserve better than okay." "You 're shaking, Jacqueline. Do you want to-" "No." "I'm just a little cold." "Better?" "Yes." "You know you can say it. But i'm not asking you to, this time." "Good." His earlier hesitation gone, he removed the last scraps of fabric we were wearing, fixed the condom in place, kissed me fiercely and rocked into me.

Perhaps you’re fascinated by the contours of my cheeks with skin like bed sheets that hide all of the complexities of what’s underneath, and present an image of simplicity (that is easier to digest than skipping heart beats for hairy legs). I wonder if these next six nights of not having to feel so alone will make you wondrous in keeping me as a bedside table: to place your hard times on before you get the forty winks your eyes need to glisten in the midday light of my bedroom. And it’s hard to fall back into sleep when I’ve fallen in love with studying the one that lies next to me. I wonder if you’ve found landscapes in my elbows like I’ve found ebbing tides in your forehead. Perhaps your love for me is fleeting, and you’ll have moments where you consider tearing yourself even further apart, but as soon as it’s possible you close your eyes again, fall out of the thought and back into sleep. But, perhaps you’ll keep me as a bedside table: to place your brain things in my cupboards, to place your step dad in my cupboards, to place your sad eyes in my drawers, to put your heart ache in my mouth, your desire for love in bite marks on my neck, and your misty breath in my ears whispering ‘you are so important to me’. -Bedside Table

I’ve been thinking about that proof I spoke of last time – that you’re where you’re supposed to be. And it occurred to me, can you prove you’d be better off somewhere else? If you’d have left the state, your relationship would have ended still. Maybe you’d have even blamed yourself, not knowing that it was doomed because of him, either way. Instead, you’re here. You got dumped, skipped class, and met the best econ tutor at the university! Who knows, maybe I’ll make you fall in love with economics.

Here's to everyone who has survived something devastating-- something that shattered your self-confidence and distorted your world in one blow. Whether you were fierce in the face of it or fell to pieces or shoved it out of sight for years-- I don't care how you got here. Every day you are stronger. Every day you are healing. Every day that you survive, you are telling that event, that person, that illness, that memory: YOU DO NOT DEFINE ME. Keep on. -- Acknowledgements

Think of a globe, a revolving globe on a stand. Think of a contour globe, whose mountain ranges cast shadows, whose continents rise in bas-relief above the oceans. But then: think of how it really is. These heights are just suggested; they’re there….when I think of walking across a continent I think of all the neighborhood hills, the tiny grades up which children drag their sleds. It is all so sculptured, three-dimensional, casting a shadow. What if you had an enormous globe that was so huge it showed roads and houses- a geological survey globe, a quarter of a mile to an inch- of the whole world, and the ocean floor! Looking at it, you would know what had to be left out: the free-standing sculptural arrangement of furniture in rooms, the jumble of broken rocks in the creek bed, tools in a box, labyrinthine ocean liners, the shape of snapdragons, walrus. Where is the one thing you care about in earth, the molding of one face? The relief globe couldn’t begin to show trees, between whose overlapping boughs birds raise broods, or the furrows in bark, where whole creatures, creatures easily visible, live our their lives and call it world enough. What do I make of all this texture? What does it mean about the kind of world in which I have been set down? The texture of the world, its filigree and scrollwork, means that there is a possibility for beauty here, a beauty inexhaustible in its complexity, which opens to my knock, which answers in me a call I do not remember calling, and which trains me to the wild and extravagant nature of the spirit I seek.

For thirty years now I have been studying my fellow-men. I do not know very much about them. I should certainly hesitate to engage a servant on his face, and yet I suppose it is on the face that for the most part we judge the persons we meet. We draw our conclusions from the shape of the jaw, the look in the eyes, the contour of the mouth. I wonder if we are more often right than wrong. Why novels and plays are so often untrue to life is because their authors, perhaps of necessity, make their characters all of a piece. They cannot afford to make them self-contradictory, for then they become incomprehensible, and yet self-contradictory is what most of us are. We are a haphazard bundle of inconsistent qualities. In books on logic they will tell you that it is absurd to say that yellow is tubular or gratitude heavier than air; but in that mixture of incongruities that makes up the self yellow may very well be a horse and cart and gratitude the middle of the week. I shrug my shoulders when people tell me that their first impressions of a person are always right. I think they must have small insight or great vanity. For my own part I find that the longer I know people the more they puzzled me: my oldest friends are just these of whom I can say that I don't know the first thing about them.

Reluctantly, he knew that he despised his fellow residents for the way in which they fit so willingly into their appointed slots in the apartment buildings, for their overdeveloped sense of responsibility and lack of flamboyance. Above all, he looked down on them for their good taste. The building was a monument to good taste, to the well-designed kitchen, to sophisticated utencils and fabrics, to elegant and never ostentatious furnishings. In short, to that whole aesthetic sensibility which these well-educated, professional people had inherited from all the schools of industrial design, all the award-winning schemes of interior decoration institutionalized by the last quarter of the century. Royal detested this orthodoxy of the intelligent. Visiting his neighbors’ apartments, he would find himself physically repelled by the contours of an award-winning coffee pot, but the well-modulated color schemes, by the good taste and intelligence that, Midas-like, had transformed everything in these apartments into an ideal marriage of function and design. In a sense, these people were the vanguard of a well-to-do and well-educated proletariat of the future, boxed up in these expensive apartments with their elegant furniture, and intelligent sensibilities, and no possibility of escape.

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy 2. Submissive to everything, open, listening 3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house 4. Be in love with yr life 5. Something that you feel will find its own form 6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind 7. Blow as deep as you want to blow 8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind 9. The unspeakable visions of the individual 10. No time for poetry but exactly what is 11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest 12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you 13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition 14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time 15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog 16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye 17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself 18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea 19. Accept loss forever 20. Believe in the holy contour of life 21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind 22. Dont think of words when you stop but to see picture better 23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning 24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge 25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it 26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form 27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness 28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better 29. You're a Genius all the time 30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

I couldn’t talk about it, about them—not yet. So I breathed “Later” and hooked my feet around his legs, drawing him closer. I placed my hands on his chest, feeling the heart beating beneath. This—I needed this right now. It wouldn’t wash away what I’d done, but … I needed him near, needed to smell and taste him, remind myself that he was real—this was real. “Later,” he echoed, and leaned down to kiss me. It was soft, tentative—nothing like the wild, hard kisses we’d shared in the hall of throne room. He brushed his lips against mine again. I didn’t want apologies, didn’t want sympathy or coddling. I gripped the front of his tunic, tugging him closer as I opened my mouth to him. He let out a low growl, and the sound of it sent a wildfire blazing through me, pooling and burning in my core. I let it burn through that hole in my chest, my soul. Let it raze through the wave of black that was starting to press around me, let it consume the phantom blood I could still feel on my hands. I gave myself to that fire, to him, as his hands roved across me, unbuttoning as he went. I pulled back, breaking the kiss to look into his face. His eyes were bright—hungry—but his hands had stopped their exploring and rested firmly on my hips. With a predator’s stillness, he waited and watched as I traced the contours of his face, as I kissed every place I touched. His ragged breathing was the only sound—and his hands soon began roaming across my back and sides, caressing and teasing and baring me to him. When my traveling fingers reached his mouth, he bit down on one, sucking it into his mouth. It didn’t hurt, but the bite was hard enough for me to meet his eyes again. To realize that he was done waiting—and so was I. He eased me onto the bed, murmuring my name against my neck, the shell of my ear, the tips of my fingers. I urged him—faster, harder. His mouth explored the curve of my breast, the inside of my thigh. A kiss for each day we’d spent apart, a kiss for every wound and terror, a kiss for the ink etched into my flesh, and for all the days we would be together after this. Days, perhaps, that I no longer deserved. But I gave myself again to that fire, threw myself into it, into him, and let myself burn.