Redwood Sayings And Quotes

Walking, I can almost hear the redwoods beating. And the oceans are above me here, rolling clouds, heavy and dark. It is winter and there is smoke from the fires. It is a world of elemental attention, of all things working together, listening to what speaks in the blood. Whichever road I follow, I walk in the land of many gods, and they love and eat one another. Suddenly all my ancestors are behind me. Be still, they say. Watch and listen. You are the result of the love of thousands.

I'll never get to hear her say, 'I love you, Mommy,' like other parents take for granted.

As I went walking I saw a sign there And on the sign it said "No Trespassing." But on the other side it didn't say nothing, That side was made for you and me. This land is your land, this land is my land From California to the New York island From the Redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters This land was made for you and me.

No one should let yesterday use up too much of today. Easy to say, hard to live.

Live or die, but don't poison everything... Well, death's been here for a long time -- it has a hell of a lot to do with hell and suspicion of the eye and the religious objects and how I mourned them when they were made obscene by my dwarf-heart's doodle. The chief ingredient is mutilation. And mud, day after day, mud like a ritual, and the baby on the platter, cooked but still human, cooked also with little maggots, sewn onto it maybe by somebody's mother, the damn bitch! Even so, I kept right on going on, a sort of human statement, lugging myself as if I were a sawed-off body in the trunk, the steamer trunk. This became perjury of the soul. It became an outright lie and even though I dressed the body it was still naked, still killed. It was caught in the first place at birth, like a fish. But I play it, dressed it up, dressed it up like somebody's doll. Is life something you play? And all the time wanting to get rid of it? And further, everyone yelling at you to shut up. And no wonder! People don't like to be told that you're sick and then be forced to watch you come down with the hammer. Today life opened inside me like an egg and there inside after considerable digging I found the answer. What a bargain! There was the sun, her yolk moving feverishly, tumbling her prize -- and you realize she does this daily! I'd known she was a purifier but I hadn't thought she was solid, hadn't known she was an answer. God! It's a dream, lovers sprouting in the yard like celery stalks and better, a husband straight as a redwood, two daughters, two sea urchings, picking roses off my hackles. If I'm on fire they dance around it and cook marshmallows. And if I'm ice they simply skate on me in little ballet costumes. Here, all along, thinking I was a killer, anointing myself daily with my little poisons. But no. I'm an empress. I wear an apron. My typewriter writes. It didn't break the way it warned. Even crazy, I'm as nice as a chocolate bar. Even with the witches' gymnastics they trust my incalculable city, my corruptible bed. O dearest three, I make a soft reply. The witch comes on and you paint her pink. I come with kisses in my hood and the sun, the smart one, rolling in my arms. So I say Live and turn my shadow three times round to feed our puppies as they come, the eight Dalmatians we didn't drown, despite the warnings: The abort! The destroy! Despite the pails of water that waited, to drown them, to pull them down like stones, they came, each one headfirst, blowing bubbles the color of cataract-blue and fumbling for the tiny tits. Just last week, eight Dalmatians, 3/4 of a lb., lined up like cord wood each like a birch tree. I promise to love more if they come, because in spite of cruelty and the stuffed railroad cars for the ovens, I am not what I expected. Not an Eichmann. The poison just didn't take. So I won't hang around in my hospital shift, repeating The Black Mass and all of it. I say Live, Live because of the sun, the dream, the excitable gift.

Amory Lovins says the primary design criteria he uses is the question “How do we love all the children?” Not just our children, not just the ones who look like us or who have resources, not just the human children but the young of birds and salmon and redwood trees. When we love all the children, when that love is truly sacred to us in the sense of being most important, then we have to take action in the world to enact that love. We are called to make the earth a place where all the children can thrive.

John Hay, in The Immortal Wilderness, has written: 'There are occasions when you can hear the mysterious language of the Earth, in water, or coming through the trees, emanating from the mosses, seeping through the undercurrents of the soil, but you have to be willing to wait and receive.' Sometimes I hear it talking. The light of the sunflower was one language, but there are others more audible. Once, in the redwood forest, I heard a beat, something like a drum or a heart coming from the ground and trees and wind. That underground current stirred a kind of knowing inside me, a kinship and longing, a dream barely remembered that disappeared back to the body.... Tonight, I walk. I am watching the sky. I think of the people who came before me and how they knew the placement of the stars in the sky, watching the moving sun long and hard enough to witness how a certain angle of light touched a stone only once a year. Without written records, they knew the gods of every night, the small, fine details of the world around them and the immensity above them. Walking, I can almost hear the redwoods beating....It is a world of elemental attention, of all things working together, listening to what speaks in the blood. Whichever road I follow, I walk in the land of many gods, and they love and eat one another. Walking, I am listening to a deeper way. Suddenly all my ancestors are behind me. Be still, they say. Watch and listen. You are the result of the love of thousands.

Whenever you see redwoods in the National Geographic, or fog, or watch Shamu on TV, you'll be seeing me. Whenever you smell pine and spruce and day-old socks, that's me. Whenever you hear wind in the tops of trees, that's me, and whenever you taste crab and wine and Brie, that's me, and whenever the wind blows your hat off or you get under a cold shower, that's me. Whenever you read about an earthquake, that's me, sure as gun's iron. Whenever you smell wet dog, that's Curtis and me, and whenever you see a Rattus rattus, that's Forrest, and I'm right behind him. Never see me again? You'll never not see me. And I'll never not see you . . .Didn't I say I'd always be your same stars? If you get to missing me, just look up.

The old woman sits on a bench before the door and quarrels With her meagre pale demoralized daughter. Once when I passed I found her alone, laughing in the sun And saying that when she was first married She lived in the old farmhouse up Garapatas Canyon. (It is empty now, the roof has fallen But the log walls hang on the stone foundation; the redwoods Have all been cut down, the oaks are standing; The place is now more solitary than ever before.) "When I was nursing my second baby My husband found a day-old fawn hid in a fern-brake And brought it; I put its mouth to the breast Rather than let it starve, I had milk enough for three babies. Hey how it sucked, the little nuzzler, Digging its little hoofs like quills into my stomach. I had more joy from that than from the others." Her face is deformed with age, furrowed like a bad road With market-wagons, mean cares and decay. She is thrown up to the surface of things, a cell of dry skin Soon to be shed from the earth's old eye-brows, I see that once in her spring she lived in the streaming arteries, The stir of the world, the music of the mountain.

There are only two choices, the main road and the back road, and each one has its good points and bad points. Say you choose the main road and get to your appointment on time. You won’t think about your choice, will you? And if you go by the back road and get there in time, again, no sweat, and you’ll never give it another thought for the rest of your life. But here’s where it gets interesting. You take the main road, there’s a three-car pileup, traffic is stalled for more than an hour, and as you sit there in your car, the only thing on your mind will be the back road and why you didn’t go that way instead. You’ll curse yourself for making the wrong choice, and yet how do you really know it was the wrong choice? Can you see the back road? Do you know what’s happening on the back road? Has anyone told you that an enormous redwood tree has fallen across the back road and crushed a passing car, killing the driver of that car and holding up traffic for three and a half hours? Has anyone looked at his watch and told you that if you had taken the back road it would have been your car that was crushed and you who were killed? Or else: No tree fell, and taking the main road was the wrong choice. Or else: You took the back road, and the tree fell on the driver just in front of you, and as you sit in your car wishing you had taken the main road, you know nothing about the three-car pileup that would have made you miss your appointment anyway. Or else: There was no three-car pileup, and taking the back road was the wrong choice. What’s the point of all this, Archie? I’m saying you’ll never know if you made the wrong choice or not. You would need to have all the facts before you knew, and the only way to get all the facts is to be in two places at the same time—which is impossible.

When she was younger, Ellie used to believe that her invisibility was a metaphor for something else, assuming it was her awkwardness, her fear of saying or doing the wrong thing. She had thought as she grew older, more confident, wiser, she would outgrow this not being noticed. But lately, Ellie really felt like a ghost. She would be in a place, but not really there. People looked through her, past her. Her invisibility had taken on a life of its own. It wasn't a metaphor anymore, or a defense mechanism or eccentric little tic. She was actually invisible. At least, that was how it felt to her. Ellie wondered whether her parents were to blame. They were, after all, children of the sixties who had met at a love-in or lie-down or something of that sort, about which Ellie knew little except that a lot of drugs had been involved. Could Ellie's lack of physical presence be a genetic mutation caused by acid or mushrooms? Ellie grew up on their hippie commune among the highest, densest redwoods, where they dug their hands deep into the soil and grew their own food, made their own clothes. So perhaps it is there that the mystery is solved. Ellie indeed was a child of the earth, a baby of beiges and taupes and browns and muted greens. Nature doesn't scream and shout, demanding constant attention, and neither did Ellie. Maybe her invisibility was just her blending right in.

I KNEW THAT if I continued to debate politics and science—and stayed in the mind instead of the heart and the spirit—it would always be about one side versus the other. We all understand love, however; we all understand respect, we all understand dignity, and we all understand compassion up to a certain point. But how could I convince the loggers to transfer those feelings that they might have for a human being to the forest? And how could I get them to let go of their stereotypes of me? Because in their mind, I was a tree-hugging, granola-eating, dirty, dreadlocked hippie environmentalist. They always managed to say this word with such disgust and disdain!

Moyers: What happened to the mythic imagination as humans beings turned from the hunting of animals to the planting of seeds? Campbell: There is a dramatic and total transformation, not just of the myths but of the psyche itself, I think. You see, an animal is a total entity, he is within a skin. When you kill that animal, he's dead – that's the end of him. There is no such think as a self-contained individual in the vegetal world. You cut a plant, and another sprout comes. Pruning is helpful to a plant. The whole thing is just a continuing inbeingness. Another idea associated with the tropical forests is that out of rot comes life. I have seen wonderful redwood forests with great, huge stumps from enormous trees that were cut down decades ago. Out of them are coming these bright new little children who are part of the same plant. Also, if you cut off the limb of a plant, another one comes. Tear off the limb of an animal, and unless it is a certain kind of lizard, it doesn't grow again. So in the forest and planting cultures, there is sense of death as not death somehow, that death is required for new life. And the individual isn't quite an individual, he is a branch of a plant. Jese uses this image when he says, "I am the vine, and you are the branches." That vineyard image is a totally different one from the separate animals. When you have a planting culture, there is a fostering of thee plant that is going to be eaten.

In fact, mostly what the Forest Service does is build roads. I am not kidding. There are 378,000 miles of roads in America’s national forests. That may seem a meaningless figure, but look at it this way—it is eight times the total mileage of America’s interstate highway system. It is the largest road system in the world in the control of a single body. The Forest Service has the second highest number of road engineers of any government institution on the planet. To say that these guys like to build roads barely hints at their level of dedication. Show them a stand of trees anywhere and they will regard it thoughtfully for a long while, and say at last, “You know, we could put a road here.” It is the avowed aim of the U.S. Forest Service to construct 580,000 miles of additional forest road by the middle of the next century. The reason the Forest Service builds these roads, quite apart from the deep pleasure of doing noisy things in the woods with big yellow machines, is to allow private timber companies to get to previously inaccessible stands of trees. Of the Forest Service’s 150 million acres of loggable land, about two-thirds is held in store for the future. The remaining one-third—49 million acres, or an area roughly twice the size of Ohio—is available for logging. It allows huge swathes of land to be clear-cut, including (to take one recent but heartbreaking example) 209 acres of thousand-year-old redwoods in Oregon’s Umpqua National Forest.

He's like a little boy again now for the first time in years because he's like let out of school, no job, the bills paid, nothing to do but gratefully amuse me, his eyes are shining -- In fact ever since he's come out of San Quentin there's been something hauntedly boyish about him as tho prison walls had taken all the adult dark tenseness out of him -- In fact every evening after supper in the cell he shared with the quiet gunman he'd bent his serious head to a daily letter or at least every-other-day letter full of philosophical and religious musings to his mistress Billie... And when you're in bed in jail after lights out and you're not sleepy there's ample time to just remember the world and indeed savor its sweetness if any (altho it's always sweet to remember it in jail tho harder in prison, as Genet shows) with the result that he'd not only come to a chastisement of his bashing bitternesses (and of course it's always good to get away from alcohol and excessive smoking for two years) (and all that regular sleep) he was just like a kid again, but as I say that haunting kidlikeness I think all ex cons seem to have when they've just come out -- In seeking to severely penalize criminals society by putting the criminals away behind safe walls actually provide them with the means of greater strength for future atrocities glorious and otherwise -- "Well I'll be damned" he keeps saying as he sees those bluffs and cliffs and hanging vines and dead trees, "you mean to tell me you ben alone here for three weeks, why I wouldn't dare that... must be awful at night ... looka that old mule down there... man, dig the redwood country way back in... reminds me of old Colorady b'god when I used to steal a car every day and drive out to hills like this with a fresh little high school sumptin" -- "Yum Yum, " says Dave Wain emphatically turning that big goofy look to us from his driving wheel with his big mad feverish shining eyes full of yumyum and yabyum too --

Stegner’s could sometimes be a grumpy goodness. In a fascinating exchange of letters with the beat poet and environmental guru Gary Snyder, Stegner argues for the less exotic virtues of the cultivated western mind versus the enlightened eastern one. This included the importance of doing what one should and not what one felt like. In a letter dated January 27, 1968, he wrote: “I have spent a lot of days and weeks at the desks and in the meetings that ultimately save redwoods, and I have to say that I never saw on the firing line any of the mystical drop-outs or meditators.” He went to those meetings because it was the right thing to do. An obligation, yes, but one he valued. “The highest thing I can think of doing is literary,” he wrote a friend. “But literature does not exist in a vacuum, or even in a partial vacuum. We are neither detached nor semi-detached, but linked to the world by a million interdependencies. To deny the interdependencies, while living on the comforts and services they make possible, is adolescent when it isn’t downright dishonest.

When I was 20 years old, I learned how much art can mean to people. I worked as a camp counselor for developmentally disabled youth and adults in the redwood forest near Santa Cruz, California. It was mostly for children with heavy autism-spectrum disorders and related conditions. There was a kid there, about 11 years old. He was fidgety, nervous, but generally happy and liked to play and explore. His nickname was "Crossing Lights" because every few seconds, he would become terribly uneasy and start saying "crossing lights...crossing lights PLEASE... CROSSING LIGHTS...PLEASE!!", screaming and crying to the point where he would be having a full mental meltdown. The only way to ease his distress was to draw a series of little symbols like this: (image shown) ...over and over again, constantly, and forever. If you stopped, he would gradually become disturbed and have a severe psychological attack. But if you kept drawing the little symbol, he was calm and peaceful, like a wave washing over him. Silence. Then, a few seconds later.. "Crossing lights... Crossing lights please..." I filled up probably thirty sheets of paper like this. Tragically, the entire camp was burnt down last year in the California wildfires. I am working on a fundraiser to help them rebuild everything.

Getting It Right" Your ankles make me want to party, want to sit and beg and roll over under a pair of riding boots with your ankles hidden inside, sweating beneath the black tooled leather; they make me wish it was my birthday so I could blow out their candles, have them hung over my shoulders like two bags full of money. Your ankles are two monster-truck engines but smaller and lighter and sexier than a saucer with warm milk licking the outside edge; they make me want to sing, make me want to take them home and feed them pasta, I want to punish them for being bad and then hold them all night long and say I’m sorry, sugar, darling, it will never happen again, not in a million years. Your thighs make me quiet. Make me want to be hurled into the air like a cannonball and pulled down again like someone being pulled into a van. Your thighs are two boats burned out of redwood trees. I want to go sailing. Your thighs, the long breath of them under the blue denim of your high-end jeans, could starve me to death, could make me cry and cry. Your ass is a shopping mall at Christmas, a holy place, a hill I fell in love with once when I was falling in love with hills. Your ass is a string quartet, the northern lights tucked tightly into bed between a high-count-of-cotton sheets. Your back is the back of a river full of fish; I have my tackle and tackle box. You only have to say the word. Your back, a letter I have been writing for fifteen years, a smooth stone, a moan someone makes when his hair is pulled, your back like a warm tongue at rest, a tongue with a tab of acid on top; your spine is an alphabet, a ladder of celestial proportions. I am navigating the North and South of it. Your armpits are beehives, they make me want to spin wool, want to pour a glass of whiskey, your armpits dripping their honey, their heat, their inexhaustible love-making dark. I am bright yellow for them. I am always thinking about them, resting at your side or high in the air when I’m pulling off your shirt. Your arms of blue and ice with the blood running to make them believe in God. Your shoulders make me want to raise an arm and burn down the Capitol. They sing to each other underneath your turquoise slope-neck blouse. Each is a separate bowl of rice steaming and covered in soy sauce. Your neck is a skyscraper of erotic adult videos, a swan and a ballet and a throaty elevator made of light. Your neck is a scrim of wet silk that guides the dead into the hours of Heaven. It makes me want to die, your mouth, which is the mouth of everything worth saying. It’s abalone and coral reef. Your mouth, which opens like the legs of astronauts who disconnect their safety lines and ride their stars into the billion and one voting districts of the Milky Way. Darling, you’re my President; I want to get this right! Matthew Dickman, The New Yorker: Poems | August 29, 2011 Issue

You're not saying anything, Cupcake...

The prisoner’s dilemma may seem to represent a rather specific and unusual scenario, but in fact it shows up all over the place in human and animal life. It turns out, for example, to underlie arms races in international relations, inaction on climate change, obstacles to trade, and even natural phenomena such as why trees grow so tall—giant redwoods could save terrific resources by only growing to, say, 50 feet (they usually grow to over 200), but in the competition for light, whoever grows that bit taller at the expense of the others will do better. In

Touch yourself for me while I play with your tits, Cupcake." "Alec," I whimpered. "Don't make me say it again, or another ice cube goes down your shirt.

A-Alec," I murmured. "Fuck," he groaned, moving his fingers faster. "I love it when you say my name, Cupcake.

But, God, she was beautiful—fucking beautiful—and it pissed me off most days. Because I could never fucking find the words to say to her.

From now on, I will use your pussy whenever I want. And you’ll do as I say. If I want you to rub your clit for me during class, you’re going to spread your legs enough for me to watch as I teach, and you’re going to get yourself off until you’re coming in front of everyone.

Fuck,” he mumbled against me, biting down softly on my shoulder. “You don’t know how long I’ve been waiting for someone to say those words to me and actually mean it. You’re all I fucking care about, Sunshine. All that I’ll ever care about.

You’re mine. Say it.” “I’m yours,” I breathed heavily, chest rising and falling. “All yours, Callan. All the time.

You think if anyone finds out, they’ll say something to the principal? The school board? This is Redwood, Miss Sato. They don’t give a fuck if I bend my best student over my desk and fuck her senseless.

No more rubbing those legs together unless I say so.” My cheeks flamed. Oh God, he had definitely seen me. “Do you understand?” “Y-yes, sir.

While I had made him look up at me, the moment I stared into those deep eyes, I froze. I didn’t want to say the wrong thing and fuck this all up, nor did I want to make him regret kissing me. Right here, right now… it was the most I’d felt alive.

I don’t know what you’ve done to me, Sunshine, but I can’t get enough of you. You’ve been the only person there for me, the only person who truly cares.” “Blaise, I…” “I know you want me to take it back and act like the same guy I was toward you that first day in World History, but I can’t. I don’t want to take it back. I fucking love you more than I’ve ever loved anyone. You’re the best damn thing that’s happened to me.” This wasn’t a character saying this in one of my stories. This was real. “You don’t have to say it back right now.” He took my hand in his and gently kissed my knuckles. “I promise I’ll wait until whenever you’re ready. I’m not going anywhere. So, if you want to run out of here, scared shitless, then you have another thing—” My chest exploded with warmth. I turned onto my stomach, gently gripped his chin in my hand, and kissed him deeply, passion completely overtaking me. “I love you too.

You’re mine,” he growled. “Say it.” “I’m yours.

Tell me that you love me again,” he mumbled against my lips. “I want to hear you say it again and again and again, Sunshine.

Gunther? Gunther?! Why the fuck is she distracted by him? What did he say to her? What did he do? Is it blackmail? Is he fucking her? Fingering her? Touching her in my classroom, outside the classroom? I needed to find the fuck out.

Everyone’s going to wonder who gave the quiet, shy valedictorian a baby. What’re you going to say when people ask who’s child you’re carrying? Are you going to tell them that it’s your teachers? That you were such a pretty little slut for him that he gave you detention just so he could fill you?

Never in a million freaking years had I thought someone would say those words to me. I had been alone for so long, throwing myself into love story after love story and wishing that I could find someone to love me as much as my characters loved each other.

I’ve been wanting to take you out forever,” he said, gently brushing his knuckles against mine. “But I wanted to do something a bit more… I don’t know, active?” “More active?” I asked, brow arched. “That’s a funny way of saying you want to get in my pants. Not many guys are as forward as you are, Jamal Simmons.

Why don’t you just leave me alone? What is your problem?” I asked. “You’re always in my love life.” He learned around me to grab a beer from the counter, his body too close to mine. “I can’t be in something that doesn’t exist,” he said. “Says the guy who can’t keep a girlfriend,” I said blowing out a breath. “Says the girl who hasn’t had a boyfriend her entire life. You must be really lonely, spending every night alone. Haven’t been touched by a man in, what? One, two years?” He chuckled menacingly at me. “You know, if I remember correctly, I was the last person to touch that pussy of yours, wasn’t I?” “You drive everyone I like away because you’re an annoying asshole.” “That didn’t answer my question. I am aren’t I? There’s no harm in admitting that you try to get on my nerves every day to get it again.” “You’re drunk,” I whispered, knowing that everything he was saying might or might not have been true. I would never admit it. “And you’re a brat,” he said into my ear. “You know what I like to do to brats.

Because with Alec.” I leaned forward and winked at Imani. “He’s like a walking hockey god.” “Who’s a walking hockey god?” Jace said, arching a brow and plopping his ass next to me. I cursed myself for actually saying that aloud, knowing that Jace would pester me about it if I didn’t tell him more and admit that I had eyes for no one else but him. “Alec, captain of the Redwood hockey team.” “You think he’s hot?” Caught between telling the truth to my boyfriend and helping my best friend get back at the most ruthless gang at school, I gnawed on the inside of my cheek, furrowed my brows in a confused expression, and gave my best awkward laugh. “Um, yes?” “The fuck you like him for?” João asked, scowling at Imani. “He can’t even hold up a fight in any of his hockey games. He fuckin’ sucks.” Imani flared her nostrils. “He doesn’t suck.” João laughed lifelessly. “He sucks better than you do.” “If you want him to suck you off so bad, why don’t you go ask him to?” Imani snapped, taunting him. “Or maybe I could ask him to show me how a real man eats pussy. Either way is fine by me.” Imani stormed out of the cafeteria with all three Poison boys following behind her. I curled my lips into a smirk and turned back to Jace. I patted his knee and winked. “Don’t worry about Alec. I only date guys who are one thousand percent more asshole-y than he is.” Jace arched his brow and grasped my jaw. “Well, this asshole”—he pointed to himself—“expects you to be at Senior Night tonight. And you’d better not be late,” Jace mumbled against my lips. “Or I’ll excuse myself from the field to come find your ass.

I’m going to come again. Come with me. Please. Don’t pull out either,” I begged. “Oh fuck,” Landon murmured. “You can’t fucking say something like that, Imani. You don’t know what it does to a guy.

Yeah, I know, but this is Akio, for crying out loud,” Imani said, shaking her head. “It’s no different than me doing something for you,” I said. “So…” She paused, a small smile making its way onto her face. “Does that make me your girl?” My entire body tensed, and I found myself unable to look away from her. She was grinning a bit too widely, and I liked the thought of her being mine way too much for me to lie to her again tonight. “If I had to kidnap a cop and kill him for you, I would, Imani.” “That didn’t answer my question. I want to hear you say it.” I swallowed hard, her presence becoming the only fucking thing in the entire room that I could focus on, and tugged on one of her curls. My heart pounded inside my chest. This feeling was so foreign. “You’re my girl.” The words came out so much softer than I’d intended them to, but that didn’t stop Imani from stretching her smile ear to ear and beaming at me. She didn’t say anything in response. Hell, she didn’t need to. Her smile told me fucking everything.

They’re so in love with her. I never thought I would say this, but it’s actually cute.

His hands all over my body again, but this time, they weren’t rough and demanding. This time, he was soft and gentle and—dare I say—loving.

What could I say? It had taken Landon getting shot and almost dying and me caring for him for her to realize that she’d been a bitch for the past eighteen years of my life.

Can you stop and listen to me?!” She hurried over to me and grabbed my forearm, pulling me back. “Please, João.” I yanked myself away from her and opened the door. “Why are you so hard-headed?!” She shouted, voice trembling, making me stop dead in my tracks, entire body tense. “Why can’t you just listen for once?! I don’t know what you want me to say to you. I answer your question, and you flip out on me.” “I didn’t like your answer.” “Well, what do you want me to say then?” “That you love me!” I shouted before I could stop myself. I swallowed hard and glanced at the ground between us. “That you fucking love me,” I whispered to myself, knowing that I had fucking screwed up by admitting some shit like that to her because, fuck, I didn’t even know what we were anymore.

Fuck, V,” he growled, pumping into me hard and fast. “Say it again.” “I like you,” I cried, tilting my head to grant him better access. “Oh God, I like you so much.

And in that moment, I didn’t say it aloud, but I knew that I liked Blaise more than I’d let on, more than I’d told him, maybe even more than I’d told myself. I might’ve loved Blaise Harleen.

I had already told her once, but I had more to say about it. I didn’t like talking about them—I fucking hated it, honestly—but I wanted to tell Imani. She had won Landon’s heart and torn down João’s walls. I had been sorta feeling left out lately.

You do as I say, Imani. Do you understand me? You might have João and Landon wrapped around your finger, but”—he wrapped his finger around one of my curls and gently tugged on it—“you’re wrapped around mine, and you know it. You fucking love it.

I love you,” I whispered, my voice trembling. “I love you so fucking much, Imani Abara.” “I love you too,” I whispered. “You don’t know how much that means to me to hear you say that, especially now. I know that you’re hurting.” João gripped my waist so tightly that I was sure he’d leave bruises, but I’d rather have bruises than watch him fall apart. “I wanted to tell you sooner. I didn’t want it to come to something like this. But I didn’t know how to say it.

Don’t ever say his name again while you’re about to come.

Please, be quiet.” “I bet you say that to Blaise too, huh?” Piper chimed.

You could have anyone in this freaking hellhole of a school. I’m not hot as fuck. I’m not cute as fuck. Go fuck Skylar.” I rushed behind her. “You don’t get to say whether I think you’re attractive or not, Vera.” “Yes, I do because guys like you don’t ever think girls like me are attractive!

What’s mine?” he asked for a final time. “All you have to do is say it, and I’ll let you come. I’ll let your pussy explode all over my cock. And if you want to keep being bratty, then I’m going to shove you to the ground and shoot my cum down your throat instead of your pussy, where I know you’re aching for it.” “I’m yours,” I said. “Every part of me, Kai, you fucking own it—

For a split moment, my heart stopped. A black fucking cloud of unknown bullshit suddenly loomed over me. I was fucking scared. Scared because… what if Imani did really love me? What if she was saying this and had really asked her mom to bring us here because… she loved me? What if Imani loved me, and one day, I lost her?

What’re you trying to do, get into my pants again?” I asked, arching a brow and stepping out the car. A gust of wind chilled my skin, forcing me to zip my jacket. “Kids only go to the Outlook if they want to fuck.” “I’m not going to deny that.” Blaise chuckled. “If I wanna fuck you, your horny ass isn’t going to say no.

Every word that came out of her mouth hurt more and more. I didn’t know what to say or how to make her believe me. I didn’t want… I didn’t want to lose her. She was the only person who paid attention to me and the only girl who I… Who I actually kinda, sorta fucking liked.

It wasn’t even that good.” He wiped his heartbreaker smirk off his face in less than a millisecond and looked in my direction. “What did you say? I thought I’d heard the girl who had begged for my cum tell me that it wasn’t even that good. Does her little back-talking mouth need a reminder of who is in control of our situation? Because I can let everyone know how much of a slut you really are, Vera.

With her brown eyes wide as fuck, her staring up at me like she actually gave a fuck about what I needed to talk to her about, as if she really, truly feared me, fuck, it had done something to me. People in Redwood only cared about themselves, but Vera… well, she now cared about what I had to say to her. It was comical, laughable almost. And it brought me joy in this miserable place that everyone called Redwood.

Tonight, I wanted to see what she had to say for herself for the sex-filled story she had written in her notebook.

So… Jace’s dick…” I said, whistling and trying to lighten the mood. Allie glanced up through watery eyes and curled her lips into a smile, a very small giggle escaping her throat. “Stop it.” “All I’m saying is that Landon is bigger.” She let out another giggle and straightened her back a bit. “No, he’s not.” Holding my hands about two feet apart from each other, I smirked. “This big.” She burst out into a fit of laughter. “Landon is not carrying a two-foot-long dick in his pants. If he was, you would be wrecked and not be able to walk for weeks.” “That’s what you think.

Say it, Imani,” he said into my ear. “Before I have to fuck those two words out of you.

If I lost them—any one of them, even João —I would hate myself because I couldn’t stop it. I didn’t know what it was, but thinking about being without them all… I couldn’t do it. After the mall the other day and after João kissed me, he had left without saying even a couple more words and with so many… fears.

You’ve been a dick to everyone lately,” I said to him. “I’m always a dick.” “You’re only a dick when you like someone,” I said, wanting to get on his nerves. “Dude, shut the fuck up,” João said. “You always gotta say some shit, don’t you?

I jogged over to her, grabbed her face in my rough hands, and kissed her hard on the mouth. She froze a moment, then placed her hands over mine and smiled into our kiss. Resting her forehead against me, she moved her lips on mine. “I love you,” I whispered as soon as she pulled away. “I love you so much.” “Kai,” she whispered. “I thought you wanted to wait.” “I can’t anymore.” I seized her waist and pulled her closer to me, wanting to touch every single inch of her. “I can’t wait until we take care of Akio’s parents. I want you to know how I feel about you now.” Time seemed to stop as I waited and waited and waited for her to say it back. “I love you, too.

She fucking loved him too, and I wanted her to say that to me as well one day, but I didn’t know if it would ever be soon.

God, they were useless when a girl was crying. They didn’t know the first thing to say or how to act around her, so Kai cleared his throat and continued.

I know something is holding you back,” she said, “but I wanted to let you know that you make me feel so safe and strong, and I… I appreciate it so much more than you will ever know. I’ve never felt this confident before I met you guys.” It looked like she wanted to say more. Fuck, I wanted her to say more.

Your job is not to protect me. Your job is to stay alive... even if it means that I die. Promise me you understand this... Before you say anything, let me get this out. Your life is more valuable than mine. We need you...I need you to stay alive...Promise me.

Much of what we know about this individual, we’ve learned from Kate. I would say that the necklace is as good a lead as we have had to date.

tips about performing on stage. “It’s all about drawing the audience in with you,” he says, prowling the class like it’s his own sold-out stadium. “You’re selling them something. Selling them a dream. And it’s your job to believe that dream first.

I’m gonna pull my hair out,” I say, “and I don’t have much left.” I run my hand through the remnants of my curls, and then it happens: I have one of those all-too-rare epiphany moments. It seems like everything happens at once: The sun comes out of the clouds, and it stops drizzling. The sand truck wheezes to life and merges into the proper lane, and traffic starts to move. It feels like I can see for miles, down into the clogged heart of San Jose: houses, office buildings, treetops waving in the breeze. We pick up speed, and the redwoods fall away behind us, and in the distance I see Mount Hamilton, its crest sparkling with fresh snow. And then it comes to me. The idea that will finally work. “Personalized shampoo by mail,” I say.

The calendar gave him unmoving pools of quiet in which to rest. He spent hours looking at the calendar. It was time past and time to come, divided into neat little boxes, and the boxes named and numbered. He would look at a box ahead, say, February 25, 1917, and think, Inside that box, I and everyone else on earth, minus a few who will die before then and plus a few who will be born, will have our lives. Inside that box, each of my acts and feelings for that twenty-four hours awaits me. And because he was sick, there was not much he could do to prepare for or to control those acts which waited for him to become their center. . . . Most of the time, he was alone. He took deep breaths of the raw smell of seed potatoes, newly cut and bleeding their milky starch. He inhaled the sun-warmed scent of the creosote-stained redwood planks. The top quilt on his bed was pieced in a star design. Each star was made up of God knows how many pieces, and each piece was of a different color and design. The designs were a tanglewood maze of leaves and flowers and stars and branches. When he got tired of calendar quiet and of cataloging smells, he took up quilt-gazing. He didn't need a world a minute bigger than his room, an inch wider than his calendar, or an iota sweeter than his own breath. But he was the only one who knew this.

Of course the boys had the last say. You don’t steal all the homing pigeons in the columbaria of a good night of Camelot and think you’re going to get away with it. So Remmy and a couple of others took to a couple of those poles with a camping hatchet. It was days and days of work for that gang of eight year olds, but they cut at it and cut at it and the thing finally fell with the great crash of an electrified redwood. All sparks and splinters. It cut out most of the service from the Triple-J Barbed Wire Telephone Company and started a small brush fire, so that was the end of that enterprise.

Man does not like to think his history is short, but so it is; so short that it is the merest instant in the Earth's history. To see this, to put man's life in context with the Earth's, imagine the whole history of the Earth compressed into the six-day week of the Biblical Creation; a scale that makes eight thousand years pass in a single second. The first day and a half of this week is too early for life, which does not appear until about Tuesday noon. During the rest of Tuesday, and also Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and well into Saturday, life expands and transforms the planet: life becomes more diverse, more stable, more beautiful; life makes a home for itself and adapts itself to live there. At four in the afternoon on Saturday, the age of reptiles comes onstage; at nine in the evening it goes offstage, but pelicans and redwoods are already here, lifeforms now threatened by man's wish to have the whole world to himself. Man does not appear on the Earth until three minutes before Saturday midnight. A second before midnight, man the hunter becomes man the farmer, and wandering tribesmen become villagers. Two-fifths of a second before midnight, Tutankhamon rules Egypt. A third of a second before midnight, Kong Fuzi and Gautama Buddha walk the Earth. A fortieth of a second before midnight, the Industrial Revolution begins. It is midnight now, and some people are saying we can go on at the rate that has worked for this fortieth of a second, because we know all the answers. Do we really know that much?

Give me the things that I need more often than the things I want. You see, I hope the universe brings us to our knees every time that we start begging for the sun more often than we are thankful for the rain. You see, I never want to know love without heartbreak. I want the universe to take me for my best parts and my worse ones. Just as I try to take people for theirs. You're not perfect, but I hope that we never try to be. You see, scientists say that for giant redwood trees to grow, they must first run at over 1000 degrees until their seeds gain the courage they need to release their seeds back down to the earth. This, this is for the people still burning. The rooftop dreamers, the naive believers, the late-night shower singers. You see, this is for the people with rough parts, with sandpaper in their history. The out-of-tune orchestra performers, the two-left-feet dance club goers, the poets, still trying to figure out how to rhyme. You don't need to hide. You need to let your rain shine. And yes, I said rain shine. As in let your best and worst parts be on display. Because you are not just your name. You're not just your biggest mistake or your shiniest trophy. You are a perfect story. Built up of highs and lows, lessons learned and lessons earned. and this, this is for you. When all else fails, let it remind you that you are a masterpiece of everything that we call art. You are a hot thunderstorm, a bright shadow, a cold volcano. You are every part of you.

Indians walk softly and hurt the landscape hardly more than the birds and squirrels, and their brush and bark huts last hardly longer than those of wood rats, while their more enduring monuments, excepting those wrought on the forests by the fires they made to improve their hunting grounds, vanish in a few centuries. How different are most of those of the white man, especially on the lower gold region—roads blasted in the solid rock, wild streams dammed and tamed and turned out of their channels and led along the sides of cañons and valleys to work in mines like slaves. Crossing from ridge to ridge, high in the air, on long straddling trestles as if flowing on stilts, or down and up across valleys and hills, imprisoned in iron pipes to strike and wash away hills and miles of the skin of the mountain's face, riddling, stripping every gold gully and flat. These are the white man's marks made in a few feverish years, to say nothing of mills, fields, villages, scattered hundreds of miles along the flank of the Range. Long will it be ere these marks are effaced, though Nature is doing what she

Finally, sweet finally, he was inside her to the hilt. "I need a second," he ground out, his body pulsing. "You're really freaking big, Quinn," she panted. "Move. Please, for the love of the goddess, move." He grinned before kissing her. "You say such sweet things.

Bay nodded. “I guess he’s not going to know if I don’t really say what’s on my mind.” Mel’s eyes danced with laughter. “I think that’s the thing with most men and women. They need to be told.

She goes from distress to conviction in zero seconds. “That’s what I’m saying! What’s crazier? Believing there might be nearby presences we don’t know about? Or cutting down the last few ancient redwoods on Earth for decking and shingles?