Filthy Love Quotes

You could have had anything else in the world, and you asked for me." She smiled up at him. Filthy as he was, covered in blood and dirt, he was the most beautiful thing she'd ever seen. "But I don't want anything else in the world.

I want to love all of my life as much as I love this night.

Yes. What is it, guilt, revenge, love, what?” I swallowed. “I live alone.” "And your point is?” "You have the Pack. You’re surrounded by people who would fall over themselves for the pleasure of your company. I have no one. My parents are dead, my entire family is gone. I have no friends. Except Jim, and that’s more of a working relationship than anything else. I have no lover. I can’t even have a pet, because I’m not at the house often enough to keep it from starving. When I come crawling home, bleeding and filthy and exhausted, the house is dark and empty. Nobody keeps the porch light on for me. Nobody hugs me and says, ‘Hey, I’m glad you made it. I’m glad you’re okay. I was worried.’ Nobody cares if I live or die. Nobody makes me coffee, nobody holds me before I go to bed, nobody fixes my medicine when I’m sick. I’m by myself.

Pretty fucking tragic twist of fate, but you don’t seem to remember that we first met years ago. An issue, since I remember a little too well. I like no one, absolutely no one, but I liked you from the start. I liked you when I didn’t know you, and now that I do know you it’s only gotten worse. Sometimes, often, always, I think about you before falling asleep. Then I dream of you, and when I wake up my head’s still there, stuck on something funny, beautiful, filthy, intelligent that’s all about you. It’s been going on for a while, longer than you think, longer than you can imagine, and I should have told you, but I have this impression, this certainty that you’re half a second from running away, that I should give you enough reasons to stay. Is there anything I can do for you? I’ll take you grocery shopping and fill your fridge when we’re back home. Buy you a new bike and a case of decent reagent and that sludge you drink. Kill the people who made you cry. Is there something you need? Name it. It’s yours. If I have it, it’s yours.

When people are missing out in their choices and cannot make a distinction between cheery, witty, funny, filthy or scurrilous walks of life, they will have a hard time to inhabit a pleasing and enriching life; and to integrate into a world of understanding and recognition. ("Love lying fallow " )

Belén shrugs. "It's a perfect plan." "As easy as falling in love," Mara adds. "Foolproof," Hector agrees. I don't deserve such friends. I blink against the sting of threatening tears and say, "All you Joyans are filthy liars.

You have very Grace Kelly-like tendencies about you. I hear Grace Kelly had a filthy mouth too," he added. "You love my filthy mouth." "True. But I like it better when its full," he said, meaningful smirk in place. "You know, if you would shut up once in a while you'd be damn near perfect." "But I'd be a silent panty ripper, which I think is a lot creepier than the angry-boss panty ripper.

And no one can ever figure out what you want, and you won't tell them, and you realize the person who loves you isn't the one you thought it would be, and you don't trust him to love you in a way you would enjoy. And the boy who loves you the wrong way is filthy. And the boy who loves you in the wrong way keeps weakening. You thought if you handed over your body he'd do something interesting.

I give a fuck if you’re a damn Jew, or a Serbo-Kroat, an American or the devil knows what! – What are your human qualities, if I may ask? – Are you honest? Do you treat your family and friends lovingly and with respect? Are you happy? Or do you exploit other human beings, in order to silence your frustration with the filthy lucre?

Shit, I guess I already loved you then. Doomed like a wineglass knowing it’ll get dropped someday, shoes that’ll be scuffed in no time, the new shirt you’ll soon enough muck up filthy.

Lord-commander, I won't pretend to love her the way you do. But I do owe her my life and my honour. I am Joyan now. And we are, all of us, filthy liars.

He takes out a cigarette and offers one to me. "I try not to indulge. It's a filthy habit," I tell him. "I love that word filthy. I love the way you force it out of your mouth like it's some kind of vermin you want to get rid of." "You've had vermin in your mouth?" "You're mean in that way, you know. You don't let anyone get away with pathetic analogies.

The dilemma of the eighth-grade dance is that boys and girls use music in different ways. Girls enjoy music they can dance to, music with strong vocals and catchy melodies. Boys, on the other hand, enjoy music they can improve by making up filthy new lyrics.

I waved but couldn’t answer, because I was finally letting myself grin as wide as I’d wanted all afternoon, all evening, every sec of every minute with you, Ed. Shit, I guess I already loved you then. Doomed like a wineglass knowing it’ll get dropped someday, shoes that’ll be scuffed in no time, the new shirt you’ll soon enough muck up filthy.

...I don't know what marriages are like on your plane. I know Fae marriages can be all about respect and treating your wife like a lady. That's crap, love. You're my wife. I'm going to do all sorts of filthy things to you because you belong to me. You're my little toy. I'm going to fuck you as often as I can and in as many ways as my filthy mind can come up with. That's a strong marriage.

Yes. I just want to fall asleep inside you. Maybe our bodies will make love again while our brains sleep.

He is lying on dirty straw. He has been beaten so many times, his body is one bloodied bruise; he is filthy, he is hideous, he is a sinner and he is utterly unloved. At any moment, at any instant, he will be put on a train in his shackles and taken through Cerberus's mouth to Hades for the rest of his wretched life. And it is at that precise moment that the light shines from the door of his dark cell #7, and in front of him Tatiana stands, tiny, determined, disbelieving, having returned for him. Having abandoned the infant boy who needs her most to go find the broken beast who needs her most. She stands mutely in front of him and doesn't see the blood, doesn't see the filth, sees only the man, and then he knows; he is not cast out. He is loved.

He said that man’s heart was the only bad heart in the animal kingdom; that man was the only animal capable of feeling malice, envy, vindictiveness, revengefulness, hatred, selfishness, the only animal that loves drunkenness, almost the only animal that could endure personal uncleanliness and a filthy habitation, the sole animal in whom was fully developed the base instinct called patriotism, the sole animal that robs, persecutes, oppresses and kills members of his own tribe, the sole animal that steals and enslaves the members of any tribe.

The truth is that the more intimately you know someone, the more clearly you’ll see their flaws. That’s just the way it is. This is why marriages fail, why children are abandoned, why friendships don’t last. You might think you love someone until you see the way they act when they’re out of money or under pressure or hungry, for goodness’ sake. Love is something different. Love is choosing to serve someone and be with someone in spite of their filthy heart. Love is patient and kind, love is deliberate. Love is hard. Love is pain and sacrifice, it’s seeing the darkness in another person and defying the impulse to jump ship.

GLINDA: Well,I'm a public figure now! People expect me to-- ELPHABA: Lie? GLINDA: (fiercely) Be encouraging! And what exactly have you been doing? Besides riding on around on that filthy thing! ELPHABA: Well, we can't all come and go by bubble. Whose invention was that, the Wizard's? Of course, even if it wasn't, I'm sure he'd still take credit for it. GLINDA: Yes, well, a lot of us are taking things that don't belong to us, aren't we? Uh oh! The two stare daggers at each other, then... ELPHABA: Now, wait just a clock-tick. I know it's difficult for that blissful blonde brain of yours to comprehend that someone like him could actually choose someone like me!But it's happened. It's real. And you can wave that ridiculous wand all you want, you can't change it! He never belonged to you -- he doesn't love you, he never did! He loves me!

You are a door to an existence she does not desire, but even if the room beyond is repugnant, that door has won a portion of her affection.

Life is nothing but rags and tags and filthy rags at that. Why was I ever born?

Life in Lubbock, Texas taught me two things: One is that God loves you and you're going to burn in hell. The other is that sex is the most awful, filthy thing on earth, and you should save it for someone you love.

The myriad of flavors explode on my tongue, shimmy through my mouth, slap my taste buds and call them filthy bastards, and I love it.

Sometimes the people you love turn your love against you, and it’s the most brutal weapon in the world.

I like no one, absolutely no one, but I liked you from the start. I liked you when I didn’t know you, and now that I do know you it’s only gotten worse. Sometimes, often, always, I think about you before falling asleep. Then I dream of you, and when I wake up my head’s still there, stuck on something funny, beautiful, filthy, intelligent that’s all about you. It’s been going on for a while, longer than you think, longer than you can imagine, and I should have told you, but I have this impression, this certainty that you’re half a second from running away, that I should give you enough reasons to stay. Is there anything I can do for you? I’ll take you grocery shopping and fill your fridge when we’re back home. Buy you a new bike and a case of decent reagent and that sludge you drink. Kill the people who made you cry. Is there something you need? Name it. It’s yours. If I have it, it’s yours.

Dante felt awful for whatever sorry fucker fell in love with his daughter. May God save that poor man’s soul because Dante sure as hell wouldn’t.

I kept you so well, buried beneath the darkest shame and stilled with filthy lies. Perhaps I should have dug deeper.

I can’t say what made me fall in love with Vietnam - that a woman’s voice can drug you; that everything is so intense. The colors, the taste, even the rain. Nothing like the filthy rain in London. They say whatever you’re looking for, you will find here. They say you come to Vietnam and you understand a lot in a few minutes, but the rest has got to be lived. The smell: that’s the first thing that hits you, promising everything in exchange for your soul. And the heat. Your shirt is straightaway a rag. You can hardly remember your name, or what you came to escape from. But at night, there’s a breeze. The river is beautiful. You could be forgiven for thinking there was no war; that the gunshots were fireworks; that only pleasure matters. A pipe of opium, or the touch of a girl who might tell you she loves you. And then, something happens, as you knew it would. And nothing can ever be the same again.

Hawk would always remain in her heart. Forever. First love was powerful.

She had it bad for that rude, hard-hearted, unsociable man.

His dominance enlivened her. His veiled desire ignited her blood. His magnetism, albeit a grumpier version, simply captivated her.

He worshipped, completely obsessed over a woman who was so far out of his league he would need to catch three connecting buses to even have a shot at licking her zip code.

He stayed far from her. And hungered to crawl near. Catching her phantom scent everywhere.

His massive body was just … sprawled. Big, beautiful and just present. A little dirty, a little angry. All masculine.

Why then should money be blamed for all the dirt and crimes it causes? For is love less filthy - love which creates life?

I love my men filthy, unkempt, and rugged around the edges.

Which is more messed up- that we have so much compared to everyone else, or that we don't think we're rich? That on any given day, we might flippantly call ourselves 'broke' or 'poor?' We are neither of those things. We are rich. Filthy rich.

- He's arrogant, and he sleeps with everything he can get his filthy hands on. Most of time, I just want to claw his creepy eyes out. How could I like him? He's a jackass. - And girls love jackasses. That's why I can't get a date. I'm too damn nice.

There's so much love in him, Dad." The mating bond showed her a depth of feeling, of heart, even greater than she'd imagined. He was someone special, Andrew Liam Kincaid, and he was hers. "I wish you could see him as I do." "That would be against the laws of nature," Abel said in a somber tone. "I have to be able to kick his ass if necessary-- therefore, I must see him as the filthy bastard who dared hurt my daughter by getting himself shot." "Are you threatening my mortally wounded mate?" Her father pressed a kiss to her temple. "I'll hold of until he's healthy.

I love to taste you, do you notice?” I curl my hands into fists around the pillowcase. “I think this sweetness is just for me. I pretend your desire has never been like this.” He dips a finger inside and brings it up to my lips. “For everyone else it was never so silky and sweet. Tell me it’s true.

He'’s in my veins. So it doesn't matter what I'm thinking about, because he’s still coursing through my blood. Even when he thinks he’s walked away.

Hawk was many things, he didn’t even touch the sides of normal let alone live in the same zip code.

She could be barefoot for the rest of our lives and I'd love her disgustingly filthy feet with every bit of strength I had.

Do I have to thank Colleen again? God, I’m so sick of thanking Colleen. Shit, she’s so great, you know? Thank you, Colleen. You’ve made a circus out of our friendship. Filthy Muggle.

The noise between his ears was a dull roar. He was seeing Gia later. His obsession was practically licking its chops for a genuine look at her without doing it sneakily. He was so fucked.

I’m not sure I ever made a woman come with my mouth before I met you,” he admits. “I love kissing you there. And I love your ass, it’s perfect.” With this, I feel his length stir against my stomach as his hands squeeze me. “I like any kind of sex with you, but I prefer being on top of you . . . You make missionary feel dirty the way you grab and move under me.

It’s weird, maybe, that I love your scar as much as I do.” I have to remind myself to breathe. “You thought it was the first thing I noticed, but it wasn’t. I didn’t even pay attention to it until the middle of the night, when you finally lay down on the bed and I kissed from your toe to your hip. Maybe you hate it, but I don’t. You earned it. I’m in awe of you.

You wanted to know what you are.” “Okay.” “What you are is mine.

God, her lips were perfect and pouty. He wanted to know if she still tasted the same.

Owned. This was what it felt like to be owned by another person.

I can’t lose you," I whisper. "Not when I feel like my life is finally falling into place. You were the missing piece. You were the cheese to my macaroni.

Oh, I love that grin. You won't be filthy for long.

No matter how dirty, how filthy, how contaminated you are inside, I still love you. And since I feel that way about you, I guess that makes me dirty too. So dirty I'll never be clean again for the rest of my life.

You’re my dream. I want to crawl inside your skin and see how you taste from the inside. I could spend a decade just listening to you sigh like that. Spend time? Give me every fucking minute and I’ll worship you like the sick, depraved bastard I am.

Every breath, every moment, possessed with an illusion of glamor, of filthy decadence, purely because it was ours, we two our own radical world, a star collapsing inward and bursting, gorgeous, in the dark.

It is the first visit in many years for your son, finally a citizen of his new country and free to travel, and you try to suppress your undercurrent of resentment at his decision to absent himself from your presence in so devastatingly severe a manner. You feel a love you know you will never be able to adequately explain or express to him, a love that flows one way down the generations, not in reverse, and is understood and reciprocated only when time has made of a younger generation an older one.

She was drunk on a cocktail of angry, hot tasting man.

Men were pricks. Him included. Him most of all.

Are you insane?” His voice was pure fucking rust. “You’re the head shrink, you don’t say shit like that to the likes of me. I’m manipulative, incapable of remorse. Is that the kind of person you want around you?

Winter’s head snapped around, away from Scarlet. Scarlet’s pace slowed, dread pulsing through her as she, too, heard the footsteps. Pounding footsteps, like someone was running at full speed toward them. She reached for the knife Jacin had given her. A man barrelled around the corner, heading straight for the princess. Winter tensed half a second before he reached her. Grabbing Winter’s elbow, he yanked back the red hood. Scarlet gasped. Her knees weakened. The man stared at Winter with a mixture of confusion and disappointment and maybe even anger, all locked up in eyes so vividly green that Scarlet could see them glowing from here. She was the one hallucinating now. She took a stumbling, uncertain step forward. Wanting to run toward him, but terrified it was a trick. Her hand tightened around the knife handle as Wolf, ignoring how Winter was trying to pull away, grabbed her arm and smelled the filthy red sleeve of Scarlet’s hoodie, streaked with dirt and blood. He growled, ready to tear the princess apart. “Where did you get this?” So desperate, so determined, so him. The knife slipped out of Scarlet’s hand. Wolf’s attention snapped to her. “Wolf?” she whispered. His eyes brightened, wild and hopeful. Releasing Winter, he strode forward. His tumultuous eyes scooped over her. Devoured her. When he was in arm’s reach, Scarlet almost collapsed into him, but at the last moment she had the presence of mind to step back. She planted a hand on his chest. Wolf froze, hurt flickering across his face. “I’m sorry,” said Scarlet, her voice teetering with exhaustion. “It’s just…I smell so awful, I can hardly stand to be around myself right now, so I can’t even imagine what it’s like for you with your sense of sm-“ Batting her hand away, Wolf dug his fingers into Scarlet’s hair and crushed his mouth against hers. Her protests died with a muffled gasp. This time, she did collapse, her legs unable to hold her a second longer. Wolf fell with her, dropping his knees to break Scarlet’s fall and cradling her body against his. He was here. He was here.

He’d never wanted anyone more to belong to him wholly, then and now. Every dream. Every fantasy. Every whispered secret. He wanted it all to belong to him. Because monsters liked to own things. To make them as dirty as they were.

He'd always known if he were this near to Gia it would break out both of their beasts. Only, hers has always been the more powerful when it had him wanting to come to heel, to do anything she wanted, to offer up his battered soul for her own keeping.

The savage possession at no time altered. If anything, it was as fucking monstrous as him. It lingered and clung to his skin making Hawk think things he had no business thinking about. He already knew if he allowed himself to fall and sink into her she’d be the best pussy he’d ever had.

Get your filthy paws off my son, feet pue tan!" Cherise

So, is this to be a business arrangement?” “No! Of course not. I want to share my meals and my bed and my life with the man I love. Christ, Jack. Don’t say such filthy things.

Fuck, what he’d give to be the one to run her a bath at the end of the day with all that smelly gunk chicks liked to dump in the water and then carry her naked to the bathroom and submerge her weary body into the water and then maybe he’d—grow a new set of balls, since the ones he had between his legs had turned him into a royal, fucking pussy.

Had a man been sexier? All her hormones were barking as she tried hard not to sweep her eyes over the veins and dusting of light hair on his forearms. This was true arousal, she thought. This was chemistry at its basest form. Raw and unfettered and crawling across the floor to the object of her sexual longing.

And then, with the feather-green darkness pressed against the windows, he puts his filthy fingers on my scrubbed hope face and says, "If I kiss you, it's all over." And then he does. And then it is.

Trust me, after thirty-one and a half years of knowing what love doesn’t feel like, I think I’m a goddamn expert at recognizing when the real thing comes along to rip right into my heart. She swallowed, making the skin at her throat flutter. “I’ve ripped right into your heart?” “Uh-huh. Brutally. Savagely.” “But I didn’t mean to,” she said, sadly. “I know, baby. That was just fate doing its thing.

And as much of a selfish, uncaring prick Hawk was, Gia was the one person to somehow have climbed under the spikes of his soul, to make him care whether he hurt her, used her, damaged her in any way with his body and fucked up mind. She was the only one he could leash his selfish wants for.

Love is worth so much more than money. There are so many people who are filthy rich, but have nobody to genuinely love them. Unconditional love is priceless. If you have someone who really loves you for your heart, without any conditions, then you are truly one of the wealthiest people in the world.

For fucks sake, Gia. You just let a goddamn sociopath into your house. Inside your fucking mouth.” Each word dripped with scorn. Disappointment. His scowl so dark it completely washed out his entire face. “You ought to have more fucking sense than that. Shit.

Alex forgets, momentarily, about the pancakes and everything else, not because he wants to do absolutely filthy things to Henry—maybe even with the apron still on—but because he loves him, and isn't that wild, to know that that's what makes the filthy things so good.

You’re crazy, you know. That’s what falling in love is all about— being vulnerable. Leaning on someone else. You don’t lose yourself in the process— you grow.

It is possible to adore those newly come into your world, to envision, no matter how late in the day, a happily entwined future with those who have not been part of your past.

For all the dirty minded, filthy mouthed, smut loving readers out there: May you always come so hard, your mind and body GLITCH.

Lazzaro has painted a heart in cum on my sheets. A filthy little love note, from him to me.

And this song,” Doug said as the CD advanced to the next track, “Makes me think about how Stephen’s love completes my soul.” Rapid-fire drumming led into lyrics describing the satisfaction one felt when pointing a Glock at a filthy puta.

How terrible and foul to squander time by seeking money. What could be worse than giving up your existence to earn such filthy lucre? Look at the poverty here. You die if you don’t have dollars.

He was a filthy fucker. Figuratively. Literally. Need crawled through the front of his stomach, to cover Gia and pump all his love into her. He wanted to cover her in his need and love until she was sticky. Sick monster he was. And she loved him.

Rain is the subject of prayer, the kind gesture of saints. Dear City, explain your irreverence: in you, rain is a visitor with nowhere to go. Where is the ground that knows only the love of water? What are the passageways to your heart? Pity the water that stays and rises on the streets, pity the water that floods into houses, so dark and filthy and heavy with rats and dead leaves and plastic. How ashamed water is to be what you have made it. What have you done to its beauty, its graceful body in pictures of oceans, its clear face in a glass?

You feel a love you know you will never be able to adequately explain or express to him, a love that flows one way, down the generations, not in reverse, and is understood and reciprocated only when time has made of a younger generation an older one.

Where are we—” Kyungsoo yelps as Jongin practically throws him over the window pane of a filthy-rich looking convertible, a treacherous little thing parked up against the curb, all black exteriors and plush white interiors, not even bothering to open the door, “going?” “To see fireflies,” Jongin says muffling coughs in his sleeves, and it’s only when Kyungsoo buckles up and looks over does he realize that the boy is grinning from ear to ear, “Real ones.

Try to fit in.” Winter glanced at her, a moment of perfect clarity and even humor in the look. She was right. They were filthy. They were bloody. Winter was a well-loved princess who was prettier than a bouquet of roses and crazier than a headless chicken. Fitting in would be a miracle.

Amy, amante, amour, he whispered, as if the words themselves were smuts of ash rising and falling, as though the candle were the story of his life and she the flame. He lay down in his haphazard cot. After a time he found and opened a book he had been reading that he had expected to end well, a romance which he wanted to end well, with the hero and heroine finding love, with peace and joy and redemption and understanding. Love is two bodies with one soul, he read, and turned the page. But there was nothing—the final pages had been ripped away and used as toilet paper or smoked, and there was no hope or joy or understanding. There was no last page. The book of his life just broke off. There was only the mud below him and the filthy sky above. There was to be no peace and no hope. And Dorrigo Evans understood that the love story would go on forever and ever, world without end. He would live in hell, because love is that also.

To become a filthy rich, first you need to be filthy.

Whatever happens, please know that I am with you. ALWAYS.

For you, I can be downright fucking filthy, Estrella, and you will love every Gods damned second of it,

And that was the point I knew I just loved this filthy, ugly, loquacious man in a fur coat, who would spend the day roaming all over town, looking for bright lights, and laughter - and then at night come on stage, and unbutton two buttons on his waistcoat, with his clumsy, fat fingers, and show you his heart beneath.

Those wide eyes made her appear innocent and sweet. It was all lies. Dante knew better—knew her. She was hellish. From afar, Cat looked tame. As if any man could make her compliant. That was her trick. It was exactly how she caught her prey. She was a goddamn fiend. If someone made the mistake of getting too close, she didn’t hesitate to sink her fucking claws straight into their jugular and bleed them dry. He loved it.

Because love, real love, the kind that lasts forever… it’s not patient or kind. Not pretty or perfect. It’s rough and hard as all hell. It’s ugly.” He steps closer, eyes never shifting from mine. “Love is holding someone’s filthy, tarnished heart in your hands and claiming it as yours anyway.

Cauldron save me," she began whispering, her voice lovely and even-like music. "Mother hold me," she went on, reciting a prayer similar to one I'd heard once before, when Tamlin eased the passing of that lesser faerie who'd died in the foyer. Another of Amarantha's victims. "Guide me to you." I was unable to raise my dagger, unable to take the step that would close the distance between us. "Let me pass through the gates; let me smell that immortal land of milk and honey." Silent tears slide down my face and neck, where they dampened the filthy collar of my tunic. As she spoke, I knew I would be forever barred from that immortal land. I knew that whatever Mother she meant would never embrace me. In saving Tamlin, I was to damn myself. I couldn't do this-couldn't lift that dagger again. "Let me fear no evil," she breathed, staring at me-into me, into the soul that was cleaving itself apart."Let me feel no pain." A sob broke from my lips. "I'm sorry," I moaned. "Let me enter eternity," She breathed. I wept as I understood. >i/i< she was saying. >ii/< Her bronze eyes were steady, if not sorrowful. Infinitely, infinitely worse than the pleading of the dead faerie beside her. I couldn't do it. But she held my gaze-held my gaze and nodded.

She could have told Marta anything at all, and Marta would have believed her. But maybe that’s what love was, she thought to herself as she fell asleep. Maybe love was that you didn’t try too hard to tell the difference. Maybe love was just believing something to be true because you’d been told. • • •

Look, suppose that there was one among all those who desire nothing but material and filthy lucre, that one, at least, is like my old Inquisitor, who himself ate roots in the desert and raved, overcoming his flesh, in order to make himself free and perfect, but who still loved mankind all his life, and suddenly opened his eyes and he saw that there is no great moral blessedness in achieving perfection of the will only to become convinced, at the same time, that millions of the rest of God's creatures have been set up only for mockery, that they will never be strong enough to manage their freedom, that from such pitiful rebels will never come giants to complete the tower, that it was not for such geese that the great idealist dreamt his dream of harmony.

I love you without end. Don't you dare think for a second that that love is gone. Don't you dare mourn for me. Miss me. Every day, just as I will miss you. Then get on with living. Do it for me. Because I can't. I will be there in every starry night, in ever whisper of breeze against your skin when you jog, I'm in every package of Starbursts, smiling down at you when you eat the pink ones.

London Next—the same day, month, year, but one strand over—is the kind of London other Londons dream: sepia tinted, skies strung with dirigibles, the viciousness of empire acknowledged only as a rosy backdrop glow redolent of spice and petalled sugar. Mannered as a novel, filthy only where story requires it, all meat pies and monarchy—this is a place Blue loves, and hates herself for loving.

Creation is built upon the promise of hope, that things will get better, that tomorrow will be better than the day before. But it's not true. Cities collapse. Populations expand. Environments decay. People get ruder. You can't go to a movie without getting in a fight with the guy in the third row who won't shut up. Filthy streets. Drive-by shootings. Irradiated corn. Permissible amounts of rat-droppings per hot dog. Bomb blasts, and body counts. Terror in the streets, on camera, in your living room. Aids and Ebola and Hepatitis B and you can't touch anyone because you're afraid you'll catch something besides love and nothing tastes as good anymore and Christopher Reeve is [dead] and love is statistically false. Pocket nukes and subway anthrax. You grow up frustrated, you live confused, you age frightened, you die alone. Safe terrain moves from your city to your block to your yard to your home to your living room to the bedroom and all you want is to be allowed to live without somebody breaking in to steal your tv and shove an ice-pick in your ear. That sound like a better world to you? That sound to you like a promise kept?

Venice was luscious. She had real curves and real cleavage. She had a stunning face, set off by a broad, lascivious grin. She had an indefinable hairstyle, a swag of thick blond dazzle that seemed always in motion, falling in her eyes, getting caught in her mouth. Venice spoke in a husky growl, with a deep, filthy laugh. Venice was no stranger to flirtation; she was practically no stranger to anyone. She smoldered, even at breakfast. Venice—at times literally—enjoyed a love affair with Manhattan.

You‘re a hard negotiator, Ray-Baby." "I‘m going to get a lot harder if you call me that again." "Give me a minute. Less than a minute. I‘m almost certain I can make a filthy joke in response to that." "No", I told him. "No, for the love of God, don’t.

This is it I’m not coming after you I’m going to lie down for half an hour This is it I’m not going down On your memory I’m not rubbing my face in it anymore I’m going to yawn I’m going to stretch I’m going to put a knitting needle Up my nose And poke out my brain I don’t want to love you For the rest of my life I want your skin To fall off my skin I want my clamp To release your clamp I don’t want to live With this tongue hanging out And another filthy song In the place Of my baseball bat This is it I’m going to sleep now darling Don’t try to stop me I’m going to sleep I’ll have a smooth face And I’m going to drool I’ll be asleep Whether you love me or not This is it The new world order Of wrinkles and bad breath It’s not going to be Like it was before Eating you With my eyes closed Hoping you won’t get up And go away It’s going to be something else Something worse Something sillier Something like this Only shorter

All I am, I give to you. I swear to be your protector, your love, your best friend as long as we walk this ear...You are the meaning. You are the reason. And you are the answer

I escaped into you because I fell in love with you.

She liked men who adored her and were into public displays of affection. I liked a man who enjoyed rape play and apparently had a serious problem with stalking .

We were tired, hungry, and wrapped in multiple layers of filthy winter clothing. None of that mattered to me; I was in love. I thought Darla was, too--but maybe with the bulldozer.

She is in every ray of sunshine that shines too bright, in the whisper of the wind against my skin as we board the plane.

If you thought to leave me now, I might tie you to the bed again. Filthy pirate. Aye, but you love me anyway.

Yeah, I want to fuck her. Bad. I want to dirty her pretty little perfection of a life. I wanna introduce her to the addiction a hard and filthy fuck can cause.

Isn’t there something you want to tell me, something filthy and lovely and true

Tell me Mr. Kincaid, what hobbies do you have? What occupies your weekends besides work?" "You." Okay. He won.

Il bacio sta all'amore come il lampo al tuono. The kiss is to love what lightning is to thunder.

He was a man who discovered love through his penis.

You can question my authority. You can question my decisions. You can even question our future, but you cannot question that. I love you.

Cauldron save me," she began whispering, her voice lovely and even-like music. "Mother hold me," she went on, reciting a prayer similar to one I'd heard once before, when Tamlin eased the passing of that lesser faerie who'd died in the foyer. Another of Amarantha's victims. "Guide me to you." I was unable to raise my dagger, unable to take the step that would close the distance between us. "Let me pass through the gates; let me smell that immortal land of milk and honey." Silent tears slide down my face and neck, where they dampened the filthy collar of my tunic. As she spoke, I knew I would be forever barred from that immortal land. I knew that whatever Mother she meant would never embrace me. In saving Tamlin, I was to damn myself. I couldn't do this-couldn't lift that dagger again. "Let me fear no evil," she breathed, staring at me-into me, into the soul that was cleaving itself apart."Let me feel no pain." A sob broke from my lips. "I'm sorry," I moaned. "Let me enter eternity," She breathed. I wept as I understood. Kill me now, she was saying. Do it fast. Don't make it hurt. Kill me now. Her bronze eyes were steady, if not sorrowful. Infinitely, infinitely worse than the pleading of the dead faerie beside her. I couldn't do it. But she held my gaze-held my gaze and nodded. As I lifted the ash dagger, something inside me fractured so completely that there would be no hope of ever repairing it. No matter how many years passed, no matter how many times I might try to paint her face.” As I lifted the ash dagger, something inside me fractured so completely that there would be no hope of ever repairing it. No matter how many years passed, no matter how many times I might try to paint her face. More faeries wailed now-her kinsmen and friends. The dagger was a weight in my hand-my hand, shining and coated with the blood of the first faerie. It would be more honorable to refuse-to die, rather than murder innocents. But... but... "Let me enter eternity," she repeated, lifting her chin. "Fear no evil," she whispered-just for me. "Feel no pain." I gripped her delicate, bony shoulder and drove the dagger into her heart. She gasped, and blood spilled onto the ground like a splattering of rain. Her eyes were closed when I looked at her face again. She slumped to the floor and didn't move. I went somewhere far, far away from myself.

Always keep believing, hoping, seeking, working, helping, forgiving, understanding and loving and your life will be meaningful. But don’t forget to be always vigilant about eagles, crows and vultures around you. In a flash, they may pounce and pinch your peace, prosperity, joy and happiness, blur your vision with their filthy wings, vilify your fame with dirt and halt your progress.

She is here. And she comes to you, and she does not speak, and the others do not notice her, and she takes your hand, and you ready yourself to die, eyes open, aware this is all an illusion, a last aroma cast up by the chemical stew that is your brain, which will soon cease to function, ad there will be nothing, and you are ready, ready to die well, ready to die like a man, like a woman, like a human, for despite all else you have loved, you have loved your father and your mother and your brother and your sister and your son and, yes, your ex-wife and you have loved the pretty girl, you have been beyond yourself, and so you have courage, and you have dignity, and you have calmness in the face of terror, and awe, and the pretty girl holds your hand, and you contain her, and this book, and me writing it, and I too contain you, who may not even be born, you inside me inside you, though not in a creepy way, and so may you, may I, may we, so may all of us confront the end.

The boys were only fourteen and twelve years old at the time, happy go-lucky, fun-loving boys, like your sons, nephews, or grandsons. Their whole lives were in front of them. Their worries and concerns were the simple ones of any twelve or fourteen-year-olds. Who are my teachers this year? Will I have friends in my class? Will Mom buy me an iPhone? Will the Lions, Tigers, Pistons, or Red Wings have good seasons? Will I do well in school? Will my parents be proud of me? Will I be invited to cool parties? Will I meet a girl? These should be the problems of Kenny and Jake Tracey. Instead, they worry about whether they can ever get the filthy and disgusting acts of this degenerate out of their minds.

He had violent passions, and on occasion desire seized his body so that he was driven to an orgy of lust, but he hated the instincts that robbed him of his self-possession. I think, even, he hated the inevitable partner in his debauchery. When he had regained command over himself, he shuddered at the sight of the woman he had enjoyed. His thoughts floated then serenely in the empyrean, and he felt towards her the horror that perhaps the painted butterfly, hovering about the flowers, feels to the filthy chrysalis from which it has triumphantly emerged. I suppose that art is a manifestation of the sexual instinct. It is the same emotion which is excited in the human heart by the sight of a lovely woman, the Bay of Naples under the yellow moon, and the Entombment of Titian. It is possible that Strickland hated the normal release of sex because it seemed to him brutal by comparison with the satisfaction of artistic creation.

Remind me to thank God I don’t have a sister.” Caine eyed him critically. He was a filthy heap of blood and soot and sand stuck to the gun oil on his face. “Yeah,” without much enthusiasm. “I’ll thank Him for ya.

This girl fucking owns me. With her sweet nature, her strength, her innocence that she's letting me shatter and of course her warm, wet pussy. She's perfect. And she's finally mine. Nothing is going to change that.

Very well. On my love for Mencheres, I swear that I will honor both you and Leila as my true partners, and I will keep my insolence, trickiness , filthiness, and general knavery to as much a minimum as I can manage.

It's because you weren't in love," Mary said. "When you're in love it's beautiful. When you're not it's just dirty filthy sex. Loveless sex has no true spiritual meaning deep inside your soul. But love makes everything totally cool. Love is God's special gift to horny teenage girls and boys. It makes them feel less guilty.

Did I fuck your brains out, my gorgeous slut?” Considering I couldn’t even remember my name, probably. And as the minutes—hours—rolled into each other, I lost myself in him. In us. In sweet, filthy, depraved oblivion.

My mother’s a prostitute. Not the filthy, streetwalking kind. She’s actually quite pretty, fairly well spoken, and has lovely clothes. But she sleeps with men for money or gifts, and according to the dictionary, that makes her a prostitute. She started working in 1940 when I was seven, the year we moved from Detroit to New Orleans.

But what, then, is original sin? According to the Apostle it is not only the lack of a good quality in the will, nor merely the loss of man’s righteousness and ability. It is rather the loss of all his powers of body and soul, of his whole outward and inward perfections. In addition to this, it is his inclination to all that is evil, his aversion against that which is good, his antipathy against light and wisdom, his love for error and darkness, his flight from and his loathing of good works, and his seeking after that which is sinful. Thus we read in Psalm 14:3: “They are all gone aside, they are all together become filthy; there is none that doeth good, no, not one”; and in Genesis 8:21: “The imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth.” Actual sins essentially consist in this that they come from out of us, as the Lord says in Matthew 15:19: “Out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies.” But original enters into us; we do not commit it, but we suffer it. We are sinners because we are the sons of a sinner. A sinner can beget only a sinner, who is like him.

The boys were only fourteen and twelve years old at the time, happy go-lucky, fun-loving boys, like your sons, nephews, or grandsons. Their whole lives were in front of them. Their worries and concerns were the simple ones of any twelve or fourteen-year-olds. Who are my teachers this year? Will I have friends in my class? Will Mom buy me an iPhone? Will the Lions, Tigers, Pistons, or Red Wings have good seasons? Will I do well in school? Will my parents be proud of me? Will I be invited to cool parties? Will I meet a girl? These should be the problems of Kenny and Jake Tracey. Instead, they worry about whether they can ever get the filthy and disgusting acts of this degenerate out of their minds.

I love you,” I repeat, the words pouring out of me. “Right now, in this moment. Not later. Not after you’ve had more time to recover. I love who you are, always. Every part of you, in every way. And you will never be broken in my eyes.

Amazing what a man thought of, looking at a fully clothed woman who did nothing more provocative than sipping her tea while gazing thoughtfully into the distance. For the thousandth time he wished he’d just met her. That they were but two strangers traveling together, that such lovely, filthy thoughts did not break him in two, but were only a pleasant pastime as he slowly fell under the spell of her aloof beauty and her hidden intensity. There were so many stories he could tell her, so many ways to draw her out of her shell. He would have waited with bated breath for her first smile, for the sound of her first laughter. He would be endlessly curious about her, eager to undress her metaphorically as well as physically. The first holding of hands. The first kiss. The first time he saw her unclothed. The first time they became one. The first time they finished each other’s sentences. But no, they’d met long ago, in the furthest years of his childhood. Their chances had come and gone. All they had ahead of them were a tedious road and a final good-bye.

They were filthy in their own ways. Without shame and without judgement, and it was the most intoxicating fucking thing he’d ever seen. You couldn’t bottle the high that came with loving acceptance. You couldn’t buy it. You had to earn it.

But Orcs and Trolls spoke as they would, without love of words or things; and their language was actually more degraded and filthy than I have shown it. I do not suppose that any will wish for a closer rendering, though models are easy to find. Much the same sort of talk can still be heard among the orc-minded; dreary and repetitive with hatred and contempt, too long removed from good to retain even verbal vigour, save in the ears of those to whom only the squalid sounds strong.

Sophie," he chastises. "You were looking down at my dick and laughing." "I didn’t laugh," I correct him. "Fine, then you were smiling at him like the two of you were sharing some inside joke. Everything good between the two of you?" "Very much so," I confirm.

Lord Jesus, Your love is beyond my understanding but I believe it’s true. Right now I offer You my shame, the filthy rags of my past. I choose to step out of this storm of condemnation and into Your peace. Thank You for loving me and for making me worthy, In Your great name, amen.

California, Labor Day weekend...early, with ocean fog still in the streets, outlaw motorcyclists wearing chains, shades and greasy Levis roll out from damp garages, all-night diners and cast-off one-night pads in Fricso, Hollywood, Berdoo and East Oakland, heading for the Monterey peninsula, north of Big Sur...The Menace is loose again, the Hell's Angels, the hundred-carat headline, running fast and loud on the early morning freeway, low in the saddle, nobody smiles, jamming crazy through traffic and ninety miles an hour down the center stripe, missing by inches...like Genghis Khan on an iron horse, a monster steed with a fiery anus, flat out through the eye of a beer can and up your daughter's leg with no quarter asked and non given; show the squares some class, give em a whiff of those kicks they'll never know...Ah, these righteous dudes, they love to screw it on...Little Jesus, the Gimp, Chocolate George, Buzzard, Zorro, Hambone, Clean Cut, Tiny, Terry the Tramp, Frenchy, Mouldy Marvin, Mother Miles, Dirty Ed, Chuck the Duck, Fat Freddy, Filthy Phil, Charger Charley the Child Molester, Crazy Cross, Puff, Magoo, Animal and at least a hundred more...tense for the action, long hair in the wind, beards and bandanas flapping, earrings, armpits, chain whips, swastikas and stripped-down Harleys flashing chrome as traffic on 101 moves over, nervous, to let the formation pass like a burst of dirty thunder...

There are so many dirty names for her that one rarely learns them all, even in one’s native language. There are dirty names for every female part of her body and for every way of touching her. There are dirty words, dirty laughs, dirty noises, dirty jokes, dirty movies, and dirty things to do to her in the dark. Fucking her is the dirtiest, though it may not be as dirty as she herself is. Her genitals are dirty in the literal meaning: stink and blood and urine and mucous and slime. Her genitals are also dirty in the metaphoric sense: obscene. She is reviled as filthy, obscene, in religion, pornography, philosophy, and in most literature and art and psychology. where she is not maligned she is magnificently condescended to, as in this diary entry by Somerset Maugham written when he was in medical school: The Professor of Gynaecology: He began his course of lectures as follows: Gentlemen, woman is an animal that micturates once a day, defecates once a week, menstruates once a month, parturates once a year and copulates whenever she has the opportunity. I thought it a prettily-balanced sentence. Were she loved sufficiently, or even enough, she could not be despised so much. were she sexually loved, or even liked, she and what is done with or to her, in the dark or in the light, she would not, could not, exist rooted in the realm of dirt, the contempt for her apparently absolute and irrevocable; horrible; immovable; help us, Lord; unjust. She is not just less; she and the sex she incarnates are a species of filth. God will not help of course: "For a whore is a deep ditch; and a strange woman is a narrow pit.

A new breed of ministers is rising up who will not wear out for the gospel. They are so caught up in passion, unity, and fullness that they run out and say, “World, here I come!” If they go into places where they get shot at, they are thrilled. If they do not get shot at, they are thrilled. If the place they go is filthy, they are thrilled. If it is clean, they are thrilled. Jesus is the joy set before them. He is their exceedingly great reward.

For the thousandth time he wished he’d just met her. That they were but two strangers traveling together, that such lovely, filthy thoughts did not break him in two, but were only a pleasant pastime as he slowly fell under the spell of her aloof beauty and her hidden intensity. … But no, they’d met long ago, in the furthest years of his childhood. Their chances had come and gone. All they had ahead of them were a tedious road and a final good-bye.

Don't let your life be sterile. Be useful. Blaze a trail. Shine forth with the light of your faith and your love. With your apostolic life wipe out the slimy and filthy mark left by the impure sowers of hatred. And light up all the ways of the earth with the fire of Christ that you carry in your heart.

Why couldn't Mr. Darcy, in the first half hour of the movie, simply walk up to Elizabeth and say, "Hey, I like you. Do you want to go out on a date? And, by the way, I'm filthy rich." I'll tell you why. Because that would defeat the purpose of a chick flick, which is to entertain women and torture men.

To survive this place, you had to want to die. That was the way of the world as remade by toubab, and Samuel's list of grievances was long: They pushed people into the mud and then called them filthy. They forbade people from accessing any knowledge of the world and then called them simple. They worked people until their empty hands were twisted, bleeding, and could do no more, then called them lazy. They forced people to eat innards from troughs and then called them uncivilized. They kidnapped babies and shattered families and then called them incapable of love. They raped and lynched and cut up people into parts, and then called the pieces savage. They stepped on people's throats with all their might and asked why the people couldn't breathe. And then, when people made an attempt to break the foot, or cut it off one, they screamed "CHAOS!" and claimed that mass murder was the only way to restore order.

It’s now or never, Dax. Tell her how you feel. Own it. Embrace it. “Never have I ever loved someone so much that I’d get down on my knees and beg her to forgive me for being too young to know that what we had was the most beautiful thing in the world, and all I had to do was let go of my fears and love her forever.

But she would never have set eyes on him or given him the time of day if he hadn't become filthy rich. His money had indeed bought him love. Given what he had seen of the world, the exchange of love for money seemed to be one of the commodities that never wavered - it was as dependable an investment as electricity.

you see, my whole life is tied up to unhappiness it's father cooking breakfast and me getting fat as a hog or having no food at all and father proving his incompetence again i wish i knew how it would feel to be free it's having a job they won't let you work or no work at all castrating me (yes it happens to women too) it's a sex object if you're pretty and no love or love and no sex if you're fat get back fat black woman be a mother grandmother strong thing but not woman gameswoman romantic woman love needer man seeker dick eater sweat getter fuck needing love seeking woman it's a hole in your shoe and buying lil sis a dress and her saying you shouldn't when you know all too well that you shouldn't but smiles are only something we give to properly dressed social workers not each other only smiles of i know your game sister which isn't really a smile joy is finding a pregnant roach and squashing it not finding someone to hold let go get off get back don't turn me on you black dog how dare you care about me you ain't go no good sense cause i ain't shit you must be lower than that to care it's a filthy house with yesterday's watermelon and monday's tears cause true ladies don't know how to clean it's intellectual devastation of everybody to avoid emotional commitment "yeah honey i would've married him but he didn't have no degree" it's knock-kneed mini skirted wig wearing died blond mamma's scar born dead my scorn your whore rough heeeled broken nailed powdered face me whose whole life is tied up to unhappiness cause it's the only for real thing i know

Love then screams in my own throat; I am the Jesuve, the filthy parody of the torrid and blinding sun. I want to have my throat slashed while violating the girl to whom I will have been able to say: you are the night. The Sun exclusively loves the Night and directs its luminous violence, its ignoble shaft, toward the earth, but finds itself incapable of reaching the gaze or the night, even though the nocturnal terrestrial expanses head continuously toward the indecency of the solar ray. The solar annulus is the intact anus of her body at eighteen years to which nothing sufficiently blinding can be compared except the sun, even though the anus is night.

She took his verbal punches and she felt silenced under the mental prison that he had held her in. She looked perfect on the outside, but her body expressed her pain. Her soul was crystallized, permanently on survival-mode. He thought he was smart, but he had no idea that he was married to a lotus. She rose every time because she knew he could not take away her worth. She knew she was meant to have more. She loved herself through the horror, and regained her ability to keep walking, to keep breathing, to keep living. She rose peacefully like the lotus, elegant and full of class, untouched by his filthy, meaningless existence... and that had always left him powerless.

Some women hate it so much that I would hear them vomiting in the bathroom between scenes. I would find others outside, smoking endless chains of Marlboro Lights… But the multi-billion dollar porn industry wants you to believe the fantasy that we porn actresses love sex. They want you to buy into the lie that we enjoy being degraded by all kinds of repulsive acts. Creatively edited films and prettified packaging are designed to brainwash consumers into believing that the lust we portray on hot and bothered faces are part of the act. But the reality is women are in unspeakable pain from being slapped, bit, spit upon, kicked and called names like “filthy little whore” and “toilet cunt.

When all’s said and done they’re a strange breed, these South and East Londoners, and they’re amused by little things. Their love of jellied eels and pie ‘n’ mash is astonishing. “Food of the Gods,” they call it, as they enter some filthy hovel to order pie ‘n’ mash, without even knowing what they’re eating. I’ve asked what meat it is and been told, “Meat? Its pie, pie ‘n’ mash with liquor. Food of the Gods.” But it’s not food of the Gods at all. It’s just pie and mashed potatoes, and that’s it. Nothing special about it. There’s nothing nostalgic about it. It’s not Bermondsey Billy Wells or the Artful Dodger. It’s just a meat pie and mashed potatoes. And it looks like Barry Manilow’s blown his nose in it.

[Women] complain about many clerks who attribute all sorts of faults to them and who compose works about them in rhyme, prose, and verse, criticizing their conduct in a variety of different ways. They then give these works as elementary textbooks to their young pupils at the beginning of their schooling, to provide them with exempla and received wisdom, so that they will remember this teaching when they come of age ... They accuse [women] of many ... serious vice[s] and are very critical of them, finding no excuse for them whatsoever. This is the way clerks behave day and night, composing their verse now in French, now in Latin. And they base their opinions on goodness only knows which books, which are more mendacious than a drunk. Ovid, in a book he wrote called Cures for Love, says many evil things about women, and I think he was wrong to do this. He accuses them of gross immorality, of filthy, vile, and wicked behaviour. (I disagree with him that they have such vices and promise to champion them in the fight against anyone who would like to throw down the gauntlet ...) Thus, clerks have studied this book since their early childhood as their grammar primer and then teach it to others so that no man will undertake to love a woman.

Tell me something filthy. I hate love, don't you?

The only person Aidan O'Donnelly was scared of, ironically enough, was his wife. And I fucking loved him for that.

Turns out quality time was the love language we both craved. That and the filthy words of affirmation he came up with when I was pinned beneath him weren’t bad either.

But a vampyre is a filthy thing, a thing that feeds its decayed body on the vital bodies of others. Its flesh is colder than death, and it has no pity, only appetite.

That’s lust. She wants me to suckle those perky tits. I just fucking know it. — Ace, Chapter 2, Erotomaniac: (Book 1) The Filthy Kings Trilogy

It is no idle boast of the vermin Socialists that their system is Christianity, and no other is genuine. And look at them! To a man […] they are atheists and in favor of Free Love—whatever that may mean. I have talked with many Socialists, but never with one who understood his subject. Empty babblers they are, muddle-headed philanthropists. They read a shilling abridgement of John Stuart Mill, and settle all economic problems over a --sirloin of turnips-- in some filthy crank food dive. Ask them any question about detail, and the bubble is pricked.

That was what stuck in the craws of all the good women of Deptford: Mrs Dempster had not been raped, as a decent woman would have been—no, she had yielded because a man wanted her. The subject was not one that could be freely discussed even among intimates, but it was understood without saying that if women began to yield for such reasons as that, marriage and society would not last long. Any man who spoke up for Mrs Dempster probably believed in Free Love. Certainly he associated sex with pleasure, and that put him in a class with filthy thinkers like Cece Athelstan.

Bad luck alone does not embitter us that badly . . . nor does the feeling that our affairs might have been better managed move us out of range of ordinary disappointment; it is when we recognize that the loss has been caused in great part by others; that it needn't have happened; that there is an enemy out there who has stolen our loaf, soured our wine, infected our book of splendid verse with filthy rhymes; then we are filled with resentment and would hang the villains from that bough we would have lounged in liquorous love beneath had the tree not been cut down by greedy and dim-witted loggers in the pay of the lumber interests. Watch out, then, watch out for us, be on your guard, look sharp, both ways, when we learn--we, in any numbers--when we find who is forcing us--wife, children, Commies, fat cats, Jews--to give up life in order to survive. It is this condition in men that makes them ideal candidates for the Party of the disappointed People.

You have no fucking idea, little bit of a thing, so old are you that you know everything? So worldly with the round eyes and the way you see the good in everything, even me. Forget everything you fucking think you know. The second I was inside you people would know, you’d be different, they’d treat you differently, tarred with my fucking ruined brush, all the rumors flying around, people who had once been your friends because they’d know I had hands all over you. I don’t fuck like a gentleman, little bit, I fuck like an animal, that stains a little girl like you. You want pretty-fucking-romance, to show off a man to your friends, to go to parties with him on your arm, so fucking meek and boring, that’s not me, will never be me. I’m not normal, the wiring is not right in my head, and I’m not for you, walk away before I’ve had my mouth on that pussy and drank down your honey, because if you don’t and I taste you, I feel how it is to shove my cock as deep and as hard as I can inside you, it’s all over, you get me? You hearing what I’m telling you? Game over, ‘cause I don’t play by anyone's rules but my own and my rules are nasty, my rules are fucking filthy.

They asked me to tell you what it was like to be twenty and pregnant in 1950 and when you tell your boyfriend you’re pregnant, he tells you about a friend of his in the army whose girl told him she was pregnant, so he got all his buddies to come and say, “We all fucked her, so who knows who the father is?” And he laughs at the good joke…. What was it like, if you were planning to go to graduate school and get a degree and earn a living so you could support yourself and do the work you loved—what it was like to be a senior at Radcliffe and pregnant and if you bore this child, this child which the law demanded you bear and would then call “unlawful,” “illegitimate,” this child whose father denied it … What was it like? […] It’s like this: if I had dropped out of college, thrown away my education, depended on my parents … if I had done all that, which is what the anti-abortion people want me to have done, I would have borne a child for them, … the authorities, the theorists, the fundamentalists; I would have born a child for them, their child. But I would not have born my own first child, or second child, or third child. My children. The life of that fetus would have prevented, would have aborted, three other fetuses … the three wanted children, the three I had with my husband—whom, if I had not aborted the unwanted one, I would never have met … I would have been an “unwed mother” of a three-year-old in California, without work, with half an education, living off her parents…. But it is the children I have to come back to, my children Elisabeth, Caroline, Theodore, my joy, my pride, my loves. If I had not broken the law and aborted that life nobody wanted, they would have been aborted by a cruel, bigoted, and senseless law. They would never have been born. This thought I cannot bear. What was it like, in the Dark Ages when abortion was a crime, for the girl whose dad couldn’t borrow cash, as my dad could? What was it like for the girl who couldn’t even tell her dad, because he would go crazy with shame and rage? Who couldn’t tell her mother? Who had to go alone to that filthy room and put herself body and soul into the hands of a professional criminal? – because that is what every doctor who did an abortion was, whether he was an extortionist or an idealist. You know what it was like for her. You know and I know; that is why we are here. We are not going back to the Dark Ages. We are not going to let anybody in this country have that kind of power over any girl or woman. There are great powers, outside the government and in it, trying to legislate the return of darkness. We are not great powers. But we are the light. Nobody can put us out. May all of you shine very bright and steady, today and always.

He asked me, "Young man, do you love art? Great, lofty, immortal art?" I felt uncomfortable, and I replied that I did. That was a fatal mistake, because Volynsky put it this way: "If you love art, young man, how can you talk to me now about filthy lucre?" He gave me a beautiful speech, itself an example of high art. It was passionate, inspired, a speech about great immortal art, and its point was that I shouldn't ask Volynsky for my pay. In doing so I defiled art, he explained, bringing it down to my level of crudity, avarice, and greed. Art was endangered. It could perish if I pressed my outrageous demands. I tried to tell him that I needed the money. He replied that he couldn't imagine or understand how a man of the arts could be capable of speaking about such trivial aspects of life. He tried to shame me. But I held my own.

Tell me you want me.” The way he says it, it’s an order, and for once, I am loving this bossy tone. “I want you, Declan.” He loosens his grip so I can lean in and take his earlobe between my teeth, tugging and then sucking on it, and then I whisper into his ear: “I want you to do and say every filthy thing you’ve ever wanted to do and say to me.” The deep, guttural sound he makes is so satisfying. “And I’m going to do the same. To you.” His hands are on my hips now. “Fucking hell, I’m going to split you in two.” My hand slips to the glorious bulge in his pants. “Fuckin’ A. I’m going to ride you like a one-horse open sleigh.

She lowered her chin to look at me over her sunglasses. "If I hadn't covered my face in time, I'd probably have a broken nose right now." "I'd stop the bleeding with the shirt off my back if that happened, Lizzie." "Yeah, and I'd probably get a bacterial infection from your filthy jersey. Why don't you just take your little toy and go?" I really was insane, because I fucking loved going back and forth like this with her.

The terrible fatalism which had overcome me of late had taken on an even more terrible form; drowning in the disintegration of family, of both countries to which I had belonged, of everything which can sanely be called real, lost in the sorrow of my filthy unrequited love, I sought out the oblivion of - I'm making it sound too noble; no otorund phrases must be used. Baldly, then: I rode the night-streets of the city, looking for death.

What I meant was, I love your filthy mouth. And I love your mouth when it sings and jokes. I love your body, and everything it does to me. I love when you come, when you squirm under me, begging for it. I love your hands, and your eyes. I love your honor and integrity. I love your loyalty, your intelligence. I love your honesty, even when it hurts me. I’ve fallen in love with you, Monica. I didn’t think it would happen to me again, but it did. Thank you.

Something creaked beneath me! A soft step on rotting wood! I jumped startled, scared, and turned, expecting to see-God knows what! Then I sighed, for it was only Chris standing in the gloom, silently staring at me. Why? Did I look prettier than usual? Was it the moonlight, shining through my airy clothes? All random doubts were cleared when he said in a voice gritty and low, "You look beautiful sitting there like that." He cleared the frog in his throat. "The moonlight is etching you with silver-blue, and I can see the shape of your body through your clothes." Then, bewilderingly, he seized me by the shoulders, digging in his fingers, hard! They hurt. "Damn you, Cathy! You kissed that man! He could have awakened and seen you, and demanded to know who you were! And not thought you only a part of his dream!" Scary the way he acted, the fright I felt for no reason at all. "How do you know what I did? You weren't there; you were sick that night." He shook me, glaring his eyes, and again I thought he seemed a stranger. "He saw you, Cathy-he wasn't soundly asleep!" "He saw me?" I cried, disbelieving. It wasn't possible . . . wasn't! "Yes!" he yelled. This was Chris, who was usually in such control of his emotions. "He thought you a part of his dream! But don't you know Momma can guess who it was, just by putting two and two together-just as I have? Damn you and your romantic notions! Now they're on to us! They won't leave money casually about as they did before. He's counting, she's counting, and we don't have enough-not yet!" He yanked me down from the widow sill! He appeared wild and furious enough to slap my face-and not once in all our lives had he ever struck me, though I'd given him reason to when I was younger. But he shook me until my eyes rolled, until I was dizzy and crying out: "Stop! Momma knows we can't pass through a looked door!" This wasn't Chris . . . this was someone I'd never seen before . . . primitive, savage. He yelled out something like, "You're mine, Cathy! Mine! You'll always be mine! No matter who comes into your future, you'll always belong to me! I'll make you mine . . . tonight . . . now!" I didn't believe it, not Chris! And I did not fully understand what he had in mind, nor, if I am to give him credit, do I think he really meant what he said, but passion has a way of taking over. We fell to the floor, both of us. I tried to fight him off. We wrestled, turning over and over, writhing, silent, a frantic strug- gle of his strength against mine. It wasn't much of a battle. I had the strong dancer's legs; he had the biceps, the greater weight and height . . . and he had much more determination than i to use something hot, swollen and demanding, so much it stile reasoning and sanity from him. And I loved him. I wanted what he wanted-if he wanted it that much, right and wrong. Somehow we ended up on that old mattress-that filthy, smelly, stained mattress that must have known lovers long before this night. And that is where he took me, and forced in that swollen, rigid male sex part of him that had to be satisfied. It drove into my tight and resisting flesh which tore and bled. Now we had done what we both swore we'd never do.

Now that you are living on such intimate terms with her, Gwyn has emerged as a slightly different person... She is both funnier and more salacious than you imagined, more vulgar and idiosyncratic, more passionate, more playful, and you are startled to realize how deeply she exults in filthy language and the bizarre slang of sex... Common twentieth-century words do not interest her. She shuns the term making love, for example, in favor of older, more hilarious locutions, such as rumpty-rumpty, quaffing, and bonker bang. A good orgasm is referred to as a bone-shaker. Her ass is a rumdadum. Her crotch is a slittie, a quim, a quim-box, a quimsby. Her breasts are boobs and tits, boobies and titties, her twin girls. At one time or another, your penis is a bong, a blade, a slurp, a shaft, a drill, a quencher, a lancelot, a lightning rod, Charles Dickens, Dick Driver, and Adam Junior... In the grip of approaching orgasm, however, she tends to revert to the contemporary standbys, falling back on the simplest, crudest words in the English lexicon to express her feelings. Cunt, pussy, fuck. Fuck me, Adam. Again and again. Fuck me, Adam. For an entire month you are the captive of that word, the willing prisoner of that word, the embodiment of that word. You dwell in the land of flesh, and your cup runneth over. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow you all the days of your life.

In a century or two this planet will have been destroyed by external cosmic forces or by the senseless activity of the human race. Human life is a freak phenomenon, soon to be blotted out. That is a consoling thought. Meanwhile we are surrounded by strange invisible entities, possibly your angels." "I hope so." "Ah, you think they are good, they cannot be good, there is no good, the tendency to evil is overwhelming. One has only to think of the horrors of sex, its violence, its cruelty, its filthy vulgarity, its descent into bestial degradation. You had better go and dream in your monastery." "Would you come and visit me there?" "Of course not. I do not visit. Only, unfortunately, am sometimes visited." "You don't want to discuss — you know — what happened? My priest said — " "No." "I care about how you are, I love you." "You still fail to realise how this sort of talk sickens me. Now please go. This will do for a welcome home scene. Tell them not to come. I desire to be left alone.

The most direct path to Party was raising pigs. The company had several dozen of these and they occupied an unequaled place in the hearts of the soldiers; officers and men alike would hang around the pigsty, observing, commenting, and willing the animals to grow. If the pigs were doing well, the swine herds were the darlings of the company, and there were many contestants for this profession. Xiao-her became a full-time swineherd. It was hard, filthy work, not to mention the psychological pressure. Every night he and his colleagues took turns to get up in the small hours to give the pigs an extra feed. When a sow produced piglets they kept watch night after night in case she crushed them. Precious soybeans were carefully picked, washed, ground, strained, made into 'soybean milk," and lovingly fed to the mother to stimulate her milk. Life in the air force was very unlike what Xiao-her had imagined. Producing food took up more than a third of the entire time he was in the military. At the end of a year's arduous pig raising, Xiao-her was accepted into the Party. Like many others, he put his feet up and began to take it easy. After membership in the Party, everyone's ambition was to become an officer; whatever advantage the former brought, the latter doubled it. Getting to be an officer depended on being picked by one's superiors, so the key was never to displease them. One day Xiao-her was summoned to see one of the college's political commissars. Xiao-her was on tenterhooks, not knowing whether he was in for some unexpected good fortune or total disaster. The commissar, a plump man in his fifties with puffy eyes and a loud, commanding voice, looked exceedingly benign as he lit up a cigarette and asked Xiao-her about his family background, age, and state of health. He also asked whether he had a fiance to which Xiao-her replied that he did not. It struck Xiao-her as a good sign that the man was being so personal. The commissar went on to praise him: "You have studied Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought conscientiously. You have worked hard. The masses have a good impression of you. Of course, you must keep on being modest; modesty makes you progress," and so on. By the time the commissar stubbed out his cigarette, Xiao-her thought his promotion was in his pocket.

When I close my eyes to see, to hear, to smell, to touch a country I have known, I feel my body shake and fill with joy as if a beloved person had come near me. A rabbi was once asked the following question: ‘When you say that the Jews should return to Palestine, you mean, surely, the heavenly, the immaterial, the spiritual Palestine, our true homeland?’ The rabbi jabbed his staff into the ground in wrath and shouted, ‘No! I want the Palestine down here, the one you can touch with your hands, with its stones, its thorns and its mud!’ Neither am I nourished by fleshless, abstract memories. If I expected my mind to distill from a turbid host of bodily joys and bitternesses an immaterial, crystal-clear thought, I would die of hunger. When I close my eyes in order to enjoy a country again, my five senses, the five mouth-filled tentacles of my body, pounce upon it and bring it to me. Colors, fruits, women. The smells of orchards, of filthy narrow alleys, of armpits. Endless snows with blue, glittering reflections. Scorching, wavy deserts of sand shimmering under the hot sun. Tears, cries, songs, distant bells of mules, camels or troikas. The acrid, nauseating stench of some Mongolian cities will never leave my nostrils. And I will eternally hold in my hands – eternally, that is, until my hands rot – the melons of Bukhara, the watermelons of the Volga, the cool, dainty hand of a Japanese girl… For a time, in my early youth, I struggled to nourish my famished soul by feeding it with abstract concepts. I said that my body was a slave and that its duty was to gather raw material and bring it to the orchard of the mind to flower and bear fruit and become ideas. The more fleshless, odorless, soundless the world was that filtered into me, the more I felt I was ascending the highest peak of human endeavor. And I rejoiced. And Buddha came to be my greatest god, whom I loved and revered as an example. Deny your five senses. Empty your guts. Love nothing, hate nothing, desire nothing, hope for nothing. Breathe out and the world will be extinguished. But one night I had a dream. A hunger, a thirst, the influence of a barbarous race that had not yet become tired of the world had been secretly working within me. My mind pretended to be tired. You felt it had known everything, had become satiated, and was now smiling ironically at the cries of my peasant heart. But my guts – praised be God! – were full of blood and mud and craving. And one night I had a dream. I saw two lips without a face – large, scimitar-shaped woman’s lips. They moved. I heard a voice ask, ‘Who if your God?’ Unhesitatingly I answered, ‘Buddha!’ But the lips moved again and said: ‘No, Epaphus.’ I sprang up out of my sleep. Suddenly a great sense of joy and certainty flooded my heart. What I had been unable to find in the noisy, temptation-filled, confused world of wakefulness I had found now in the primeval, motherly embrace of the night. Since that night I have not strayed. I follow my own path and try to make up for the years of my youth that were lost in the worship of fleshless gods, alien to me and my race. Now I transubstantiate the abstract concepts into flesh and am nourished. I have learned that Epaphus, the god of touch, is my god. All the countries I have known since then I have known with my sense of touch. I feel my memories tingling, not in my head but in my fingertips and my whole skin. And as I bring back Japan to my mind, my hands tremble as if they were touching the breast of a beloved woman.

I love you.” She was almost angry. “Do you get it? You. These kids. This life. It is my world.” He nodded. She knew he felt the same way, but this Blake didn’t talk, he proved. He found the spot on her body that made her see white and held her until she was desperate for more. Then he reached behind her and turned on the washer. Dirty. Filthy for her. He kissed her and added tongue, bit her neck gently while the vibrations from the machine increased. She would come for him like this. He pushed up her shirt and pulled down her panties so he could be inside her when she was lost in the ecstasy of it, of him. He came right after she did, and she locked him close with her legs, dragging her nails down his back as he bit his lip to stay quiet. He kissed the top of her head in between gasps for air. He looked in her eyes before responding, “I get it.

He doesn't love me in an ordinary fashion, with flower petals and saccharine words. He loves me sublimely, dirty words and filthy thoughts. He fists my hair and pushes me down. He grabs my face, he tastes my lips, devouring me with venom kisses and vampire bites. That's how he loves me; Recklessly, yet lovingly, down to the depths and desperateness of my lonely bones. He understands me: my needs, my hungers, my cravings, desires. He is the only one who has ever gotten to my core, my soul! He completes me, makes me holy. Cinder and crimson unite, infinite combustion.

What’s with the jade?” The apartment was Japanese in style. Not Chinese. “The apartment’s Japanese, I know, but I have a thing for most Asian things.” “Why?” He shrugged. “Don’t know. I just love the complicated simplicity of it all. The paradox pleases me.” Well, those were wet dream-inspiring words.

You ought to have had a man to make you wash floors and kick you in the belly when you didn’t hurry up for him,” said Henny with all the hate of a dozen years. “I’m as rotten as she is—I’ve had men too—I’ve gone trailing my draggletail in all sorts of low dives—I’ve taken money from a man to keep his children—I’m a cheat and a liar and a dupe and a weak idiot and there’s nothing too low for me, but I’m still ‘mountains high’ above you and your sickly fawning brother who never grew up—I’m better than you who go to church and than him who is too good to go to church, because I’ve done everything. I’ve been dirty and low and done things you’re both too stupid and too cowardly to do, but however low I am, I’m not so filthy crawling in the stench of the gutter, I haven’t got a heart of stone, I don’t sniff, sniff, sniff when I see a streetwalker with a ragged blouse, too good to know what she is: I hate her but I hate myself.

THIS IS IT This is it I’m not coming after you I’m going to lie down for half an hour This is it I’m not going down on your memory I’m not rubbing my face in it any more I’m going to yawn I’m going to stretch I’m going to put a knitting needle up my nose and poke out my brain I don’t want to love you for the rest of my life I want your skin to fall off my skin I want my clamp to release your clamp I don’t want to live with this tongue hanging out and another filthy song in the place of my baseball bat This is it I’m going to sleep now darling Don’t try to stop me I’m going to sleep I’ll have a smooth face and I’m going to drool I’ll be asleep whether you love me or not This is it The New World Order of wrinkles and bad breath It’s not going to be like it was before eating you with my eyes closed hoping you won’t get up and go away It’s going to be something else Something worse Something sillier Something like this only shorter

THE VOICE YOU HEAR WHEN YOU READ SILENTLY is not silent, it is a speaking- out-loud voice in your head; it is *spoken*, a voice is *saying* it as you read. It's the writer's words, of course, in a literary sense his or her "voice" but the sound of that voice is the sound of *your* voice. Not the sound your friends know or the sound of a tape played back but your voice caught in the dark cathedral of your skull, your voice heard by an internal ear informed by internal abstracts and what you know by feeling, having felt. It is your voice saying, for example, the word "barn" that the writer wrote but the "barn" you say is a barn you know or knew. The voice in your head, speaking as you read, never says anything neutrally- some people hated the barn they knew, some people love the barn they know so you hear the word loaded and a sensory constellation is lit: horse-gnawed stalls, hayloft, black heat tape wrapping a water pipe, a slippery spilled *chirr* of oats from a split sack, the bony, filthy haunches of cows... And "barn" is only a noun- no verb or subject has entered into the sentence yet! The voice you hear when you read to yourself is the clearest voice: you speak it speaking to you. ~~-Thomas Lux

You are a filthy, dirty, incurable scumbag. God is perfectly holy. If it were up to God you’d be tossed into Hell to burn in conscious torment forever. That’s what you deserve by being you. That’s how bad you are. Thankfully, God worked this out by brutally executing his innocent son by death on a cross. If you believe and accept this along with other central doctrines, God will forgive you. God will never be fond of a scumbag like you, but at least you’ll make it into Heaven when you die. In the meantime, you’re off the hook because when God looks at scumbag you, God magically doesn’t really see scumbag you; he sees Jesus instead. You will never amount to much in God’s eyes anyway. But how amazing that God loves someone like you who doesn’t deserve it.

They pushed people into the mud and then called them filthy. They forbade people from accessing any knowledge of the world and then called them simple. They worked people until their empty hands were twisted, bleeding, and could do no more, then called them lazy. They forced people to eat innards from troughs and then called them uncivilized. They kidnapped babies and shattered families and then called them incapable of love. They raped and lynched and cut up people into parts, and then called the pieces savage. They stepped on people’s throats with all their might and asked why the people couldn’t breathe. And then, when people made an attempt to break the foot, or cut it off one, they screamed “CHAOS!” and claimed that mass murder was the only way to restore order.

Harriet Larson had said yes all her life. To her parents. To her teachers. To Lou and the girls. To Corinne and Sophie. She'd said yes to shopkeepers, to doctors, to car salesmen, to Girl Scout leaders, to Mormons on rounds, to hairdressers who wouldn't let her go gray. She'd been raised to say yes, to agree and approve and adapt and accommodate, to step aside as the architect of her own happiness. After Lou's death she vowed to say yes only when that yes belonged to her, solely to her. And so: Yes to college. Yes to teaching. Yes to retirement. Yes without being asked; yes before being asked. Yes to Book Club. Yes to Violet. Yes to the filthy and broken Dawna-Lynn, for whom she was searching out a bright, becoming color from a closet too full of beige. These yesses felt like power, like gateways, like love. "Frank." She laid her cheek on his chest. "Yes.

G took her hand in his and traced his finger over the delicate skin of her arm. What she didn't realize was that he was scrawling the words of a poem he had recently written. It was inspired by his lady and he had spent many long hours trying to find the words that adequately conveyed the feelings of his heart. There were many false starts, because at first he tried to capture the moment a horse fell in love with a ferret. Shall I compare thee to a barrel to apples? Thou art more hairy, but sweeter inside. Rough winds couldn't keep me from taking you to chapel, When finally a horse would take a bride... And then he tried to wax poetic about the ferret alone ... Shall I compare thee to a really large rat? Thou art more longer, with less disease. One would never mistake you for a listless cat ... Nor a filthy dog, because my dog has fleas. He could never confess his passion for poetry with those poetry examples.

When you’re going to have a baby, it’s like planning a fabulous vacation trip—to Italy. You buy a bunch of guide books and make your wonderful plans. The Coliseum. The Michelangelo David. The gondolas in Venice. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It’s all very exciting. After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The flight attendant comes in and says, “Welcome to Holland.” “Holland?!?” you say. “What do you mean Holland?? I signed up for Italy! I’m supposed to be in Italy. All my life I’ve dreamed of going to Italy.” But there’s been a change in the flight plan. They’ve landed in Holland and there you must stay. The important thing is that they haven’t taken you to a horrible, disgusting, filthy place, full of pestilence, famine and disease. It’s just a different place. So you must go out and buy new guide books. And you must learn a whole new language. And you will meet a whole new group of people you would never have met. It’s just a different place. It’s slower-paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy. But after you’ve been there for a while and you catch your breath, you look around . . . and you begin to notice that Holland has windmills . . . and Holland has tulips. Holland even has Rembrandts. But everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy . . . and they’re all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there. And for the rest of your life, you will say “Yes, that’s where I was supposed to go. That’s what I had planned.” And the pain of that will never, ever, ever, ever go away . . . because the loss of that dream is a very, very significant loss. But . . . if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn’t get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things . . . about Holland.

She is here. And she comes to you, and she does not speak, and the others do not notice her, and she takes your hand, and you ready yourself to die, eyes open, aware that this is all an illusion, a last aroma cast up by the chemical stew that is your brain, which will soon cease to function, and there will be nothing, and you are ready, ready to die well, ready to die like a man, like a woman, like a human, for despite all else you have loved, you have loved your father and your mother and your brother and your sister and your son, and yes, your ex-wife, and you have loved the pretty girl, you have loved beyond yourself, and so you have courage, and you have dignity, and you have calmness in the face of terror, and awe, and the pretty girl holds your hand, and you contain her, and this book, and me writing it, and I too contain you, who may not yet even be born, you inside me inside you, though not in a creepy way, and so may you, may I, may we, so may all of us confront the end.

It was astonishing how loudly one laughed at tales of gruesome things, of war’s brutality-I with the rest of them. I think at the bottom of it was a sense of the ironical contrast between the normal ways of civilian life and this hark-back to the caveman code. It made all our old philosophy of life monstrously ridiculous. It played the “hat trick” with the gentility of modern manners. Men who had been brought up to Christian virtues, who had prattled their little prayers at mothers’ knees, who had grown up to a love of poetry, painting, music, the gentle arts, over-sensitized to the subtleties of half-tones, delicate scales of emotion, fastidious in their choice of words, in their sense of beauty, found themselves compelled to live and act like ape-men; and it was abominably funny. They laughed at the most frightful episodes, which revealed this contrast between civilized ethics and the old beast law. The more revolting it was the more, sometimes, they shouted with laughter, especially in reminiscence, when the tale was told in the gilded salon of a French chateau, or at a mess-table. It was, I think, the laughter of mortals at the trick which had been played on them by an ironical fate. They had been taught to believe that the whole object of life was to reach out to beauty and love, and that mankind, in its progress to perfection, had killed the beast instinct, cruelty, blood-lust, the primitive, savage law of survival by tooth and claw and club and ax. All poetry, all art, all religion had preached this gospel and this promise. Now that ideal had broken like a china vase dashed to hard ground. The contrast between That and This was devastating. It was, in an enormous world-shaking way, like a highly dignified man in a silk hat, morning coat, creased trousers, spats, and patent boots suddenly slipping on a piece of orange-peel and sitting, all of a heap, with silk hat flying, in a filthy gutter. The war-time humor of the soul roared with mirth at the sight of all that dignity and elegance despoiled. So we laughed merrily, I remember, when a military chaplain (Eton, Christ Church, and Christian service) described how an English sergeant stood round the traverse of a German trench, in a night raid, and as the Germans came his way, thinking to escape, he cleft one skull after another with a steel-studded bludgeon a weapon which he had made with loving craftsmanship on the model of Blunderbore’s club in the pictures of a fairy-tale. So we laughed at the adventures of a young barrister (a brilliant fellow in the Oxford “Union”) whose pleasure it was to creep out o’ nights into No Man’s Land and lie doggo in a shell-hole close to the enemy’s barbed wire, until presently, after an hour’s waiting or two, a German soldier would crawl out to fetch in a corpse. The English barrister lay with his rifle ready. Where there had been one corpse there were two. Each night he made a notch on his rifle three notches one night to check the number of his victims. Then he came back to breakfast in his dugout with a hearty appetite.

And they had no idea what lives inside me, what I can do.” “I know what you do to me,” Kyle said, finding his eyes. “It’s everything right, honest, and good.” She stood on her tiptoes and kissed his lips. “Kyle, I’m intense and devoted, and I need a lot of direction just to get through my day.” “Cole, I’m impulsive and devoted and hopeless. I have a filthy mouth, and I don’t see it cleaning up anytime soon.” “I would like to make love to you. Here. Right now,” Cole said, continuing his confession. “But I’m afraid I’ll lose you, that you’ll leave your body and go somewhere else. Will you stay with me?” “I’m your shadow now, Cole. I’ll be where you are.” Kyle set her jaw, determined. “Okay,” he said. “This is how it’ll go. I’m going to give you pleasure. And you’re going to take it. No reciprocating.” He instantly saw doubt in her face. “Please, this time—which will be the first of so many—let me make you happy. Let my touch cleanse you. When I’m done, I want your body to belong just to us.” He could feel himself smiling, just thinking about it.

Ichimei's fingers, capable of returning a dying plant to life or repairing a watch without looking, revealed to Alma her own rebellious, hungry nature. She enjoyed shocking him, challenging him, seeing him blush with embarrassment and delight. She was daring, he was restrained; she was noisy during her orgasms, he covered her mouth. She dreamed up a rosary of romantic, passionate, flattering, and filthy phrases to whisper in his ear or write to him in urgent missives; he maintained the reserve typical of his character and culture.

The most compelling new idea that Bratton brought to life stemmed from the broken window theory, which was conceived by the criminologists James Q. Wilson and George Kelling. The broken window theory argues that minor nuisances, if left unchecked, turn into major nuisances: that is, if someone breaks a window and sees it isn’t fixed immediately, he gets the signal that it’s all right to break the rest of the windows and maybe set the building afire too. So with murder raging all around, Bill Bratton’s cops began to police the sort of deeds that used to go unpoliced: jumping a subway turnstile, panhandling too aggressively, urinating in the streets, swabbing a filthy squeegee across a car’s windshield unless the driver made an appropriate “donation.” Most New Yorkers loved this crackdown on its own merit. But they particularly loved the idea, as stoutly preached by Bratton and Giuliani, that choking off these small crimes was like choking off the criminal element’s oxygen supply. Today’s turnstile jumper might easily be wanted for yesterday’s murder. That junkie peeing in an alley might have been on his way to a robbery.

But upon a day, the good providence of God called me to Bedford, to work on my calling; and in one of the streets of that town, I came where there were three or four poor women sitting at a door, in the sun, talking about the things of God; and being now willing to hear them discourse, I drew near to hear what they said, for I was now a brisk talker also myself, in the matters of religion; but I may say, I heard but understood not; for they were far above, out of my reach.  Their talk was about a new birth, the work of God on their hearts, also how they were convinced of their miserable state by nature; they talked how God had visited their souls with His love in the Lord Jesus, and with what words and promises they had been refreshed, comforted, and supported, against the temptations of the devil: moreover, they reasoned of the suggestions and temptations of Satan in particular; and told to each other, by which they had been afflicted and how they were borne up under his assaults.  They also discoursed of their own wretchedness of heart, and of their unbelief; and did contemn, slight and abhor their own righteousness, as filthy, and insufficient to do them any good.

I thumped her on the back, picked her up and dropped her on top of her dungarees. “Put them pants on,” I said, “and be a man.” She did, but she cried quietly until I shook her and said gently, “Stop it now. I didn’t carry on like that when I was a little girl.” I got into my clothes and dumped her into the bow of the canoe and shoved off. All the way back to the cabin I forced her to play one of our pet games. I would say something—anything—and she would try to say something that rhymed with it. Then it would be her turn. She had an extraordinary rhythmic sense, and an excellent ear. I started off with “We’ll go home and eat our dinners.” “An’ Lord have mercy on us sinners,” she cried. Then, “Let’s see you find a rhyme for ‘month’!” “I bet I’ll do it … jutht thith onthe,” I replied. “I guess I did it then, by cracky.” “Course you did, but then you’re wacky. Top that, mister funny-lookin’!” I pretended I couldn’t, mainly because I couldn’t, and she soundly kicked my shin as a penance. By the time we reached the cabin she was her usual self, and I found myself envying the resilience of youth. And she earned my undying respect by saying nothing to Anjy about the afternoon’s events, even when Anjy looked us over and said, “Just look at you two filthy kids! What have you been doing—swimming in the bayou?” “Daddy splashed me,” said Patty promptly. “And you had to splash him back. Why did he splash you?” “ ’Cause I spit mud through my teeth at him to make him mad,” said my outrageous child. “Patty!” “Mea culpa,” I said, hanging my head. “ ’Twas I who spit the mud.” Anjy threw up her hands. “Heaven knows what sort of a woman Patty’s going to grow up to be,” she said, half angrily. “A broad-minded and forgiving one like her lovely mother,” I said quickly. “Nice work, bud,” said Patty. Anjy laughed. “Outnumbered again. Come in and feed the face.

She merely wiped the floor with paper towels and said nothing, brushing her free hand against my shoulder blade—my shoulder blade!—as she carried the soaked paper to the trash can, never holding me fast, refraining not out of lack of humanity but out of fear of being drawn into a request for further tenderness, a request that could only bring her face-to-face with some central revulsion, a revulsion of her husband or herself or both, a revulsion that had come from nowhere, or from her, or perhaps from something I’d done or failed to do, who knew, she didn’t want to know, it was too great a disappointment, far better to get on with the chores, with the baby, with the work, far better to leave me to my own devices, as they say, to leave me to resign myself to certain motifs, to leave me to disappear guiltily into a hole of my own digging. When the time came to stop her from leaving, I did not know what to think or wish for, her husband who was now an abandoner, a hole-dweller, a leaver who had left her to fend for herself, as she said, who’d failed to provide her with the support and intimacy she needed, she complained, who was lacking some fundamental wherewithal, who no longer wanted her, who beneath his scrupulous marital motions was angry, whose sentiments had decayed into a mere sense of responsibility, a husband who, when she shouted, “I don’t need to be provided for! I’m a lawyer! I make two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year! I need to be loved!” had silently picked up the baby and smelled the baby’s sweet hair, and had taken the baby for a crawl in the hotel corridor, and afterward washed the baby’s filthy hands and soft filthy knees, and thought about what his wife had said, and saw the truth in her words and an opening, and decided to make another attempt at kindness, and at nine o’clock, with the baby finally drowsy in his cot, came with a full heart back to his wife to find her asleep, as usual, and beyond waking. In short, I fought off the impulse to tell Rachel to go fuck herself.

I’m yours. Fuck me, Cole,” she murmurs. Fuck. I thrust in, and her gasp meets my moan in a blissful explosion of lust. Like animals, we fuck against the wall, kissing and bouncing up and down. She rides me like an expert while sweat drips down my forehead, and her pussy is wetter than anything I’ve ever felt before. We were made for each other, her and me, like lightning and thunder in the night sky. And I can’t fucking stop loving her. Our mouths entangle in a furious battle while we fuck like madmen high on lust. Her body quakes with need as goose bumps scatter on her skin. My cock pulses inside her, and I’m slamming into her so hard I can barely fucking keep it together. I move away from the wall and carry her to the table in the back of the room where I put her down and swipe everything off it. She lies down, and I fuck her against the table like a savage, my hands grasping at her waist and tits. I’m delirious with need, completely consumed by my own desire. I lean over to kiss her on the neck, drawing a line all the way down to her nipples, which peak from the attention I lavishly dish out. And when I lean up to slam into her fully, her eyes almost roll into the back of her head. A filthy smile spreads on my lips, knowing it was me who made her feel this way. After all this waiting, all this fighting, all this tugging and pulling, she is finally mine.

Only a fool says in his heart There is no Creator, no King of kings, Only mules would dare to bray These lethal mutterings. Over darkened minds as these The Darkness bears full sway, Fruitless, yet, bearing fruit, In their fell, destructive way. Sterile, though proliferate, A filthy progeny sees the day, When Evil, Thought and Action mate: Breeding sin, rebels and decay. The blackest deeds and foul ideals, Multiply throughout the earth, Through deadened, lifeless, braying souls, The Darkness labours and gives birth. Taking the Lord’s abundant gifts And rotting them to the core, They dress their dish and serve it out Foul seeds to infect thousands more. ‘The Tree of Life is dead!’ they cry, ‘And that of Knowledge not enough, Let us glut on the ashen apples Of Sodom and Gomorrah.’ Have pity on Thy children, Lord, Left sorrowing on this earth, While fools and all their kindred Cast shadows with their murk, And to the dwindling wise, They toss their heads and wryly smirk. The world daily grinds to dust Virtue’s fair unicorns, Rather, it would now beget Vice’s mutant manticores. Wisdom crushed, our joy is gone, Buried under anxious fears For lost rights and freedoms, We shed many bitter tears. Death is life, Life is no more, Humanity buried in a tomb, In a fatal prenatal world Where tiny flowers Are ripped from the womb, Discarded, thrown away, Inconvenient lives That barely bloomed. Our elders fare no better, Their wisdom unwanted by and by, Boarded out to end their days, And forsaken are left to die. Only the youthful and the useful, In this capital age prosper and fly. Yet, they too are quickly strangled, Before their future plans are met, Professions legally pre-enslaved Held bound by mounting student debt. Our leaders all harangue for peace Yet perpetrate the horror, Of economic greed shored up Through manufactured war. Our armies now welter In foreign civilian gore. How many of our kin are slain For hollow martial honour? As if we could forget, ignore, The scourge of nuclear power, Alas, victors are rarely tried For their woeful crimes of war. Hope and pray we never see A repeat of Hiroshima. No more! Crimes are legion, The deeds of devil-spawn! What has happened to the souls Your Divine Image was minted on? They are now recast: Crooked coins of Caesar and The Whore of Babylon. How often mankind shuts its ears To Your music celestial, Mankind would rather march To the anthems of Hell. If humanity cannot be reclaimed By Your Mercy and great Love Deservedly we should be struck By Vengeance from above. Many dread the Final Day, And the Crack of Doom For others the Apocalypse Will never come too soon. ‘Lift up your heads, be glad’, Fools shall bray no more For at last the Master comes To thresh His threshing floor.

It’s so cute, isn’t it?” Arianna said dreamily. “Are we seeing the same creature? It’s like a demented goat with a bone growth.” “You’re going to hurt its feelings! Now shut up and sit on the ground.” I did as I was told, sticking my ankle out. “How is it going to heal me?” I asked, suddenly nervous. I pictured it licking my ankle and gagged. I could only imagine the diseases unicorn saliva had or what it carried around in its filthy, matted beard and hair. Bleating reproachfully, it stared at me with its doleful, square-pupiled brown eyes. “Oh, fine. Great, glorious unicorn, beloved of oblivious girls everywhere, please heal me. Now, if you don’t mind.” With one last bat of its gunk-crusted eyelashes, it lowered its head and put its stubby horn against my ankle. I cringed, waiting for pain, but felt instead tingling warmth spread out, almost like having butterflies in my stomach. Only in my ankle. Butterflies . . . with rainbows. The feeling of wholeness and well-being spread up my leg and into my entire body, and I couldn’t stop grinning. The forest was beautiful! The tree branches, naked against the brightening sky, held unimaginable wonders. The hard-packed dirt beneath me was a treasure trove of unrealized potential, lovely for what it could eventually give life to. I could sit out here forever and just enjoy nature. I was so happy! And rainbows! Why did I keep thinking of rainbows? Who cared! Rainbows were totally awesome! And the unicorn! I beamed at it, reaching out my hand to stroke it. There was never a creature more beautiful, more majestic. I’d spend the rest of my life out here, and we’d prance around the forest, worship the sunlight, bathe in the moonlight, and . . . I shook my head, scattering the idiotic warm fuzzies that had invaded. “Whoa,” I said, shoving the unicorn’s head away. “That’s enough of that.” I looked down at my ankle, which was now completely healed, not even a scar left. I fixed a stern look on the unicorn. “I am not going to frolic in an eternal meadow of sunshine and moonlight with you, you rotten little fink. But thanks.” I smiled, just enough to be nice without being too encouraging, and patted it quickly on the head. I was going to soak that hand in bleach. “Okay, let’s get out of here.” I stood, testing my ankle and relieved with the utter lack of pain. I still had an irrational desire to do an interpretive dance about rainbows, but it was a small price to pay for being healed.

Poem in a Straight Line:" I never knew a soul who ever took a licking. My friends have all been champions at everything. And I, so often vulgar, so often obscene, so often vile, I, so deliberately parasitical, Unforgivably filthy, I, so often without patience to take a bath, I, who’ve been so ridiculous, so absurd, Tripping up in public on the carpet of etiquette, I, so grotesque and mean, submissive and insolent, Who’ve been insulted and not said a word, And when putting a word in growing still more ridiculous, I who strike chambermaids as laughable, I who feel porters wink sarcastically, I who’ve been scandalous about money, borrowing and not paying it back, I, who when the time came to fight, ducked As far as I could out of punching range, I who go into a sweat over the slightest thing — I’m convinced no one’s better than I at this sort of game. No one I know, none of my speaking acquaintances, Ever acted ridiculous, ever took insults, Was ever anything but noble – yes, all of them princes, living their lives… How I’d love to hear a human voice, from any one of them. Confessing not to sins but to infamies, Speaking not of violent but of cowardly acts! But no, each one’s a Paragon, to hear them tell it. Is there no one in this world who’d confess to me he’s been vile just once? All you princes, my brothers, Enough – I’m fed up with demigods! Where are the real people in this world? Am I the only scoundrel and bungler alive? Maybe women don’t always fall for them. Maybe they’ve been betrayed. But ridiculous? Never! And I, who’ve been ridiculous but never betrayed, How do I speak to their Highnesses without stammering? I, who’ve been vile, literally vile, Vile in the meanest and rottenest possible sense of the word

He hooks his finger into the soft cup of my bra and lowers it. His forehead presses against mine and he looks down, to the hard point of my nipple. “Jesus,” he mutters. “I can take it off—” “No.” He groans softly and thumbs the pebble back and forth. Pinches it just this side of too much, making me gasp. “I’m not going to fuck you, but God, I could.” His entire palm rubs against my breast, and my whimper is humiliating. This is going to feel good. Really, really good. It’s already much better than . . . than anything. Pulling embarrassing, unfortunate noises out of me. “What do I do?” he asks, fitting his fingers in the dips of my ribs. I look up at him, glossy-eyed, already a little dazed. “What?” “What do you like?” He’s looking down at my body like it’s a beautiful space oddity, something belonging to a minor goddess, to be investigated in filthy, methodical, obscene ways. His hand traces my flat stomach. Skims the place where my thigh highs transition into tender skin. Brushes reverently against the pod right above my panties, like this little thing my life depends on is as much a part of me as my navel. J.J. asked me to take it off, said he found it off-putting. Made bionic woman jokes. And then there’s Jack. Licking his lips and asking, “Where do I start?” I have no clue. “Um . . .” He kisses me again, this time slow and gentle, pulling back from that initial brink. He uncovers my other breast, and his fingers are back, playing with my nipple like it’s an instrument. Liquid warmth hooks low in my belly. “Trial and error, then.” “What do you do with other girls?” “Other girls?” “Normal girls.” He laughs into my collarbone, then starts sucking on it. “Elsie.” “I just want to know. If I . . . if I weren’t me, what would you do?” “No.

She murmured, “Keeping me alive…intact…just so I can work their damned stele and get Cohort blood…all over my hands. Gun to your neck…blood on my hands…saints against God.” “Don’t talk,” said Crown roughly. “You’re spouting nonsense.” “You haven’t talked sense in months.” She burbled with coughing again. “You’re the one facing the dark night of the soul, Princess.” “Love that melodrama. Is there Eighth somewhere in your family tree?” “Gave yourself up… gave all of us up…for what? Propaganda and a leash…promise of salvation without understanding the sin. Hect and the hideous Sixth House mechanism…and now they are taken too. For what? Our lives? Is this living, Corona?” “You’ve never lived a single day in your life,” said Corona bitterly. “It’d be against regulations.” The Captain said, “Name and rank: Captain Judith Deuteros. House…Second,” and Crown scrubbed at her face with her hand, little licks of hair escaping from their elastic and curling over her forehead like light. The Captain broke off and said, “You think you’re walking the tightrope with fast talking and your face…steeled myself to the talking long ago. But you’re slipping, Princess…can’t save you from that…Hect, my hands are too filthy to save you…” It was funny to think of anyone wanting to save Camilla. The Captain’s eyes passed restlessly to Nona. Sweat was beading on her temples. The Captain focused, and said hoarsely, “Ninth, where is the mercy of the Tomb? Where is your sword in the coffin? Who are your masters now, and who do you master? Where is my cavalier, Reverend Daughter? Where is yours?” Her voice rose. “Because I saw her—in the waves—she was there in the grey water—I saw them all—they hurt me—where is my hunger? I eat and eat and eat without surcease, my green thing, my green-and-breathing thing…

She wraps her legs around my waist, and I walk us slowly down the hall. "Mmm, wait," she whines against my mouth. "I haven't showered. I'm so gross, and I don't..." She trails off as I turn into my bathroom, then set her down. She shuffles her bare feet against the gray stone tile, an inquisitive look on her face as she looks around the narrow space bathed in neutral hues. I push open the glass door and turn on the shower. Water cascades from the waterfall showered. "Oh," she says as she grins and bites her bottom lip. By the time we've helped each other out of our clothes, the water's warm. I help her in first, then step in. And then, under the hot stream of water, we resume our dirty kissing and grabbing. "Wait, wait." She presses a hand against my chest, then reaches for the shampoo bottle on the ledge. "I do need to get clean first." I laugh and follow her lead by shampooing my own hair and doing a quick rinse with body wash. She holds her hand out for the loofah, but I shake my head. "Let me?" A devilish smirk tugs at her perfect mouth. When she nods and licks her lips, I have to take a second. God, this woman. The way she's sweet and filthy all at once is enough to make me lose it right here. But I refuse. Not before she gets what I'm dying to give her. I work up a lather and run the loofah all over her body. I take my time, paying attention to every part of her. These beautifully curved hips, the fullness of her thighs, the gentle curve of her waist, her arms, her hands, the swell of her boobs. And then I lather up my hands and slowly work between her legs. She clutches both hands around my biceps, and her toes curl against the earthen-hued river rock that lines the shower floor. Her eyes go wide and pleading as she looks up at me. I lean down to kiss her. "Tell me what you want." "You. Just you. Please." With her breathy request, I'm ready to burst. Not yet, though. She reaches down to palm me, but I gently push her hand away. I want this to be one hundred percent about her. When she presses her mouth against my shoulder and her sounds go louder and more frantic, I work my hand faster. She's panting, pleading, shouting. When I feel the sting of her teeth against my skin, I grin. Fuck yeah, my girl is rough when she loses it and I love it. I love her. She explodes against my palm, the weight of her body shuddering against me. I've got her, though. I've always, always got you. When she starts to ease back down, she lets out a breathy laugh. "Oh my god." I nod down at her, which only makes her laugh harder. Then she glances down at what I'm sporting between my legs and flashes a naughty smirk. "Let's do something about that." Soon it's me at the mercy of her hands. My head spins at the pleasure she delivers so confidently, like she knows every single one of my buttons to push. When I lose it, I'm shuddering and grunting. For a few seconds, my vision's blurry. She's that incredible.

Why am I to be pitied, you say? Yes! there's nothing to pity me for! I ought to be crucified, crucified on a cross, not pitied! Crucify me, oh judge, crucify me but pity me! And then I will go of myself to be crucified, for it's not merry-making I seek but tears and tribulation!... Do you suppose, you that sell, that this pint of yours has been sweet to me? It was tribulation I sought at the bottom of it, tears and tribulation, and have found it, and I have tasted it; but He will pity us Who has had pity on all men, Who has understood all men and all things, He is the One, He too is the judge. He will come in that day and He will ask: 'Where is the daughter who gave herself for her cross, consumptive step-mother and for the little children of another? Where is the daughter who had pity upon the filthy drunkard, her earthly father, undismayed by his beastliness?' And He will say, 'Come to me! I have already forgiven thee once.... I have forgiven thee once.... Thy sins which are many are forgiven thee for thou hast loved much....' And he will forgive my Sonia, He will forgive, I know it... I felt it in my heart when I was with her just now! And He will judge and will forgive all, the good and the evil, the wise and the meek.... And when He has done with all of them, then He will summon us. 'You too come forth,' He will say, 'Come forth ye drunkards, come forth, ye weak ones, come forth, ye children of shame!' And we shall all come forth, without shame and shall stand before him. And He will say unto us, 'Ye are swine, made in the Image of the Beast and with his mark; but come ye also!' And the wise ones and those of understanding will say, 'Oh Lord, why dost Thou receive these men?' And He will say, 'This is why I receive them, oh ye wise, this is why I receive them, oh ye of understanding, that not one of them believed himself to be worthy of this.' And He will hold out His hands to us and we shall fall down before him... and we shall weep... and we shall understand all things! Then we shall understand all!...

A suspicion, a doubt, a jealousy grew in my mind, which turned the hairs on my head to filthy snakes, as though my thoughts hissed and spat on my scalp. My bride’s breath soured, stank in the grey bags of my lungs. I’m foul mouthed now, foul tongued, yellow fanged. There are bullet tears in my eyes. Are you terrified? Be terrified. It’s you I love, perfect man, Greek God, my own; but I know you’ll go, betray me, stray from home. So better by far for me if you were stone. I glanced at a buzzing bee, a dull grey pebble fell to the ground. I glanced at a singing bird, a handful of dusty gravel spattered down. I looked at a ginger cat, a housebrick shattered a bowl of milk. I looked at a snuffling pig, a boulder rolled in a heap of shit. I stared in the mirror. Love gone bad showed me a Gorgon. I stared at a dragon. Fire spewed from the mouth of a mountain. And here you come with a shield for a heart and a sword for a tongue and your girls, your girls. Wasn’t I beautiful? Wasn’t I fragrant and young? Look at me now. - Medusa by Carol Ann Duffy -

But wait. My eyes are almost burned by what I see. There’s a bowl in front of me that wasn’t there before. A brown button bowl and in it some apricots, some small oranges, some nuts, cherries, a banana. The fruits, the colours, mesmerize me in a quiet rapture that spins through my head. I am entranced by colour. I lift an orange into the flat filthy palm of my hand and feel and smell and lick it. The colour orange, the colour, the colour, my God the colour orange. Before me is a feast of colour. I feel myself begin to dance, slowly, I am intoxicated by colour. I feel the colour in a quiet somnambulant rage. Such wonder, such absolute wonder in such an insignificant fruit. I cannot. I will not eat this fruit. I sit in quiet joy, so complete, beyond the meaning of joy. My soul finds its own completeness in that bowl of colour. The forms of each fruit. The shape and curl and bend all so rich, so perfect. I want to bow before it. Loving that blazing, roaring, orange colour ... Everything meeting in a moment of colour and form, my rapture no longer abstract euphoria. It is there in that tiny bowl, the world recreated in that broken bowl. I feel the smell of each fruit leaping into me and lifting me and carrying me away. I am drunk with something that I understand but cannot explain. I am filled with a sense of love. I am filled and satiated by it. What I have waited and longed for has without my knowing come to me, and taken all of me. For days I sit in a kind of dreamy lethargy, in part contemplation and in part worship. The walls seem to be singing. I focus all of my attention on the bowl of fruit. At times I fondle the fruits, at times I rearrange them, but I cannot eat them. I cannot hold the ecstasy of the moment and its passionate intensity. It seems to drift slowly from me as the place in which I am being held comes back to remind me of where I am and of my condition. But my containment does not oppress me. I sit and look at the walls but now this room seems so expansive, it seems I can push the walls away from me. I can reach out and touch them from where I sit and yet they are so far from me.

Tonight, however, Dickens struck him in a different light. Beneath the author’s sentimental pity for the weak and helpless, he could discern a revolting pleasure in cruelty and suffering, while the grotesque figures of the people in Cruikshank’s illustrations revealed too clearly the hideous distortions of their souls. What had seemed humorous now appeared diabolic, and in disgust at these two favourites he turned to Walter Pater for the repose and dignity of a classic spirit. But presently he wondered if this spirit were not in itself of a marble quality, frigid and lifeless, contrary to the purpose of nature. ‘I have often thought’, he said to himself, ‘that there is something evil in the austere worship of beauty for its own sake.’ He had never thought so before, but he liked to think that this impulse of fancy was the result of mature consideration, and with this satisfaction he composed himself for sleep. He woke two or three times in the night, an unusual occurrence, but he was glad of it, for each time he had been dreaming horribly of these blameless Victorian works… It turned out to be the Boy’s Gulliver’s Travels that Granny had given him, and Dicky had at last to explain his rage with the devil who wrote it to show that men were worse than beasts and the human race a washout. A boy who never had good school reports had no right to be so morbidly sensitive as to penetrate to the underlying cynicism of Swift’s delightful fable, and that moreover in the bright and carefully expurgated edition they bring out nowadays. Mr Corbett could not say he had ever noticed the cynicism himself, though he knew from the critical books it must be there, and with some annoyance he advised his son to take out a nice bright modern boy’s adventure story that could not depress anybody. Mr Corbett soon found that he too was ‘off reading’. Every new book seemed to him weak, tasteless and insipid; while his old and familiar books were depressing or even, in some obscure way, disgusting. Authors must all be filthy-minded; they probably wrote what they dared not express in their lives. Stevenson had said that literature was a morbid secretion; he read Stevenson again to discover his peculiar morbidity, and detected in his essays a self-pity masquerading as courage, and in Treasure Island an invalid’s sickly attraction to brutality. This gave him a zest to find out what he disliked so much, and his taste for reading revived as he explored with relish the hidden infirmities of minds that had been valued by fools as great and noble. He saw Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë as two unpleasant examples of spinsterhood; the one as a prying, sub-acid busybody in everyone else’s flirtations, the other as a raving, craving maenad seeking self-immolation on the altar of her frustrated passions. He compared Wordsworth’s love of nature to the monstrous egoism of an ancient bellwether, isolated from the flock.

To survive in this place, you had to want to die. That was the way of the world as remade by toubab, and Samuel‘s list of grievances was long: they pushed people into the mud and then called them filthy. They forbade people from accessing any knowledge of the world and then called them simple. They worked people until their empty hands were twisted, bleeding, and could do no more, then called them lazy. They forced people to eat innards from troughs and then called them uncivilized. They kidnapped babies and shattered families and then called them incapable of love. They raped and lynched and cut up people into parts, and then called the pieces savage. They stepped on people’s throats with all their might and asked why the people couldn’t breathe. And then, when people made an attempt to break the foot, or cut it off one, they screamed “CHAOS!” and claimed that mass murder was the only way to restore order. They praised every daisy and then called every blackberry stain. They bled the color from God’s face, gave it a dangle between its legs, and called it holy. Then, when they were done breaking things, they pointed at the sky and called the color of the universe itself a sin. And the whole world believed them, even some of Samuel’ s people. Especially some of Samuel’s people. This was untoward and made it hard to open your heart, to feel a sense of loyalty that wasn’t a strategy. It was easier to just seal yourself up and rock yourself to sleep.

When the head of his cock sweeps past her sweet spot yet again, something explosive erupts out of nowhere. "Oh, fuuuuck," she whimpers. Her walls flutter around him as her whole body ignites into flames. The pleasure is all-consuming, knocking her thoughts from her mind. Alexander huffs, stunned. "Did you--- Just from me---" Eden covers her face with her hands, embarrassed. "I'm sorry. You just feel so good, I---" He chuckles, pushing her hands aside to pepper her face with kisses. "Don't be sorry, it's alright. Can I keep going?" "Yes. Yes, please. I want to make you come. Give it to me rough." "If you want it rough, you'd better hold on to me, sweetheart." She does so, circling his neck with her arms. He rolls his hips against her, pace picking up in rhythm. The slap of their skin combined with the sound of their filthy groans is music to her ears. He snaps his hips into her relentlessly, searching for more of that sweet friction. The bed creaks in protest beneath them, but they show no signs of slowing down. "Fucking God, your pussy feels so good." "Fuck, I--- Right there, oh God right there." "So nice and tight for me. Spread your legs wider--- that's it." Eden can feel herself growing tighter, hotter, brighter. She can hardly breathe, and her heart is racing a mile a minute. "I think--- Fuck, I think I'm going to come again. I'm gonna---" Alexander claims her mouth, tongue sweeping over hers as he pins both her wrists above her head against the pillow. He fucks her harder, claiming her, pushing her closer and closer toward climax. When it happens, she moans into his mouth, quaking beneath his weight. He finds release, too, his muscles tensing as he spills over.

Perhaps I ought to stuff up these sleeping things and go to bed. But I’m still too wide awake I’d only writhe about. If I had got him on the phone if we’d talked pleasantly I should have calmed down. He doesn’t give a fuck. Here I am torn to pieces by heartbreaking memories I call him and he doesn’t answer. Don’t bawl him out don’t begin by bawling him out that would muck up everything. I dread tomorrow. I shall have to be ready before four o’clock I shan’t have had a wink of sleep I’ll go out and buy petits fours that Francis will tread into the carpet he’ll break one of my little ornaments he’s not been properly brought up that child as clumsy as his father who’ll drop ash all over the place and if I say anything at all Tristan will blow right up he never let me keep my house as it ought to be yet after all it’s enormously important. Just now it’s perfect the drawing room polished shining like the moon used to be. By seven tomorrow evening it’ll be utterly filthy I’ll have to spring-clean it even though I’ll be all washed out. Explaining everything to him from a to z will wash me right out. He’s tough. What a clot I was to drop Florent for him! Florent and I we understood one another he coughed up I lay on my back it was cleaner than those capers where you hand out tender words to one another. I’m too softhearted I thought it was a terrific proof of love when he offered to marry me and there was Sylvie the ungrateful little thing I wanted her to have a real home and a mother no one could say a thing against a married woman a banker’s wife. For my part it gave me a pain in the ass to play the lady to be friends with crashing bores. Not so surprising that I burst out now and then. “You’re setting about it the wrong way with Tristan” Dédé used to tell me. Then later on “I told you so!” It’s true I’m headstrong I take the bit between my teeth I don’t calculate. Maybe I should have learned to compromise if it hadn’t been for all those disappointments. Tristan made me utterly sick I let him know it. People can’t bear being told what you really think of them. They want you to believe their fine words or at least to pretend to. As for me I’m clear-sighted I’m frank I tear masks off. The dear kind lady simpering “So we love our little brother do we?” and my collected little voice: “I hate him.” I’m still that proper little woman who says what she thinks and doesn’t cheat. It made my guts grind to hear him holding forth and all those bloody fools on their knees before him. I came clumping along in my big boots I cut their fine words down to size for them—progress prosperity the future of mankind happiness peace aid for the underdeveloped countries peace upon earth. I’m not a racist but don’t give a fuck for Algerians Jews Negroes in just the same way I don’t give a fuck for Chinks Russians Yanks Frenchmen. I don’t give a fuck for humanity what has it ever done for me I ask you. If they are such bleeding fools as to murder one another bomb one another plaster one another with napalm wipe one another out I’m not going to weep my eyes out. A million children have been massacred so what? Children are never anything but the seed of bastards it unclutters the planet a little they all admit it’s overpopulated don’t they? If I were the earth it would disgust me, all this vermin on my back, I’d shake it off. I’m quite willing to die if they all die too. I’m not going to go all soft-centered about kids that mean nothing to me. My own daughter’s dead and they’ve stolen my son from me.