# data[].attributes.body
[left off p.30 , The Waves )

# data[].attributes.body
"I, who shall walk the earth these seventy years, am born entire, out of hatred, out of discord."

Louis, The Waves (26)

# data[].attributes.body
"There is no crudity here, no sudden kisses."

Louis, The Waves (23)

# data[].attributes.body
"Everybody seems to be doing things for this moment only; and never again. Never again. The urgency of it all is fearful."

Bernard, The Waves (19)

# data[].attributes.body
"Those are white words, like stones one picks up by the seashore."

Susan, The Waves (13)

# data[].attributes.body
"we melt into each other with phrases. We are edged in mist. We are unsubstantial territory."

BernardThe Waves (9)

# data[].attributes.body
"I always wanted to live where I could watch foreign trains."

The City & The City (40)

# data[].attributes.body
“There is an art to smiling in a way that others will believe. It is always important to include the eyes; otherwise, people will know you hate them.”

The Fifth Season (5)

# data[].attributes.body
"He breathes deeply and becomes a fixture of the earth. They tread upon the filaments of his nerves' their voices stir the fine hairs of his skin; their breaths ripple the air he draws into his lungs. They are on him. They are in him.

But he knows that he is not, and will never be, one of them."

The Fifth Season (4)

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"I fall in love twice a year. Once in the fall and once in the  spring. In the fall the kids come back to school, a few blocks from here. There are plenty of newcomers waiting to be loved the wrong way in September."

Jack Mann, Beebo Brinker

# data[].attributes.body
"It shook you. But not because it was vulgar and indecent. Because it was beautiful and exciting."

Jack Mann, Beebo Brinker

# data[].attributes.body
"She wanted everyone to be happy on this night full of sequin-lights and clouds of music."

Beebo Brinker

# data[].attributes.body
"You can't be in love with someone you just met."

Beebo, Beebo Brinker

# data[].attributes.body
"She stood with her dazzling naked back, delicately sugared with freckles, to Beebo, who admired it in infatuated silence."

Beebo Brinker

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"But all the time I was waiting for somebody wonderful to come along; for a beautiful love affair to make it all right. We'd live quietly together, we'd cherish each other, and life would be rosy."

Paula Ash,  Beebo Brinker

# data[].attributes.body
"All I can do is invite you. I can't make you come."
- note the double entendre

Venus Bogardus,  Beebo Brinker

# data[].attributes.body
"He's your sunshine, not mine."

Beebo,  Beebo Brinker

# data[].attributes.body
Venus: I'm not responsible for your weakness, am I?
Beebo: You know damn well you are.

Beebo Brinker

# data[].attributes.body
"The night was mild and the stars were sprinkled thick as spilled soapflakes across the sky."

Beebo Brinker

# data[].attributes.body
"Promise me one last thing, and then I'll shut up."
"I'll promise you that moon on a platter if you want it."

Beebo Brinker

# data[].attributes.body
"It was easy to get carried away when you had your arms full of [v]enus."

Beebo Brinker

# data[].attributes.body
"I'd rather fall in love in the sunshine than the rain."

Jack Mann, Beebo Brinker

# data[].attributes.body
“I want to get acquainted with you once and for all, and I want you to get acquainted with me. And with that, to say good-bye. I think it's best to get acquainted before parting."

Ivan Fyodorovich, The Brothers Karamazov (229)

# data[].attributes.body
"I think that everyone should love life before everything else in the world."

Alexei Fyodorovich, The Brothers Karamazov (231)

# data[].attributes.body
"[His] body was brown, was sweaty, the most beautiful creation I had ever seen since then."

Giovanni's Room (8)

# data[].attributes.body
"Supernovas are where gold forms; the only place. All gold comes from supernovas."

Dr. Manhattan, Watchmen
(121, panel 2)

# data[].attributes.body
"The cold, suffocating dark does on forever, and we are alone. Live our lives, lacking anything better to do. Devise reason later. Born from oblivion; bear children, hell-bound as ourselves; go into oblivion. There is nothing else."

Walter Kovacs, Watchmen (204)

# data[].attributes.body
"The euphemisms of body were equally puzzling, if no less colorful."

Zami (32)

# data[].attributes.body
"The sensual context of life was masked and cryptic, but attended in well-coded phrases."

Zami (32)

# data[].attributes.body
"I am a reflection of my mother's secret poetry as well as of her hidden angers."

Zami (32)

# data[].attributes.body
"I was sane and grown a poet with a mouthful of stars."

Zami (32)

# data[].attributes.body
"I grew up feeling like an only planet, or some isolated world in a hostile, or at best, unfriendly, firmament."

Zami (34)

# data[].attributes.body
"I could feel the creeping warmth of her, slowly spreading all along the front of my body through the many layers of nothing, and as she  turned to me the damp warmth of her breath fogged up my spectacles a little in the crisp winter air."

Zami (39)

# data[].attributes.body
"I never saw her dance except privately, for me."

Zami (91)

# data[].attributes.body
"We usually made dates to meet at Columbus Circle or in Washington Square Park, and for a while the golden leaves near each fountain hid the harshness of the confused and alien colors that were sweeping up over our paths."

Zami (93)

# data[].attributes.body
“There is no future. There is no past. ...Time is simultaneous, an intricately structured jewel that humans insist on viewing one edge at a time, when the whole design is visible in every facet.”

Jon, Watchmen (286)

# data[].attributes.body
"I read atoms. I see the ancient spectacle that birthed the rubble. Beside this, human life is brief and mundane."

Jon, Watchmen (297)

# data[].attributes.body
“Do you know what it takes to change the world? ...You have to figure out what you really believe in and then find other people who feel the same way. The only thing you have to do alone is to decide what’s important to you."

Mrs. Noble, Stone Butch Blues (46)

# data[].attributes.body
"[She] told me if I were a guy she'd be in love with me."

Stone Butch Blues

# data[].attributes.body
"We refuse to be each other."

H.J. Blackham
epigraph for 'kipps and belsey' On Beauty

# data[].attributes.body
"He's one of those people, [he thought], who looks like one quality very much, and the quality in this case is 'noble'. [He] didn't much trust people like that, so full of one quality, like books with insistent covers."

On Beauty (33)

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"Writing about music is like dancing about architecture"

On Beauty (44)

# data[].attributes.body
"Each couple is its own vaudeville act."

On Beauty (56)

# data[].attributes.body
"If she was going to leave him, she should have done so in the winter. But she had stayed and now summer was here. The only account she could give of this decision was that she was not quite done loving him, which was the same as saying she was not quite done yet with Love—Love itself being coeval with knowing [him]."

On Beauty  (59-60)

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"[She] returned her own gaze to the moon. So much more lovely than the sun and you can look at it without fear or harm."

On Beauty (71)

# data[].attributes.body
"There is such a shelter in each other."

On Beauty (93)
quote by Nick Laird

# data[].attributes.body
"We walked our talk and we appreciated it in each other. Slow dancing at dawn, making fierce love, leaning together as one with the motorcycle into a deep curve – it just got better and better."

Stone Butch Blues (

# data[].attributes.body
"Time is not what it is but how it is felt."

On Beauty (129)

# data[].attributes.body
“Outside a rush of torches.
Laughter drifts into the hall. The elect have always been this way.
Getting old, dying, starting again. Not noticing.
(...) It has always been this way, nothing can intrude.”

Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit (93)

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“We were quiet, and I traced the outline of her marvellous bones and the triangle of muscle in her stomach. What is it about intimacy that makes it so very disturbing?”

Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit (103)

# data[].attributes.body
[beginning]
"He wanted to stabilize his life, settle down with one person and live out a long, rewarding love. But [he] could only love other men: boys, to be exact. Volatile, charming, will-o-the-wisp boys, who looked him up Friday, loved him Saturday, and left him Sunday. They couldn't even spell 'stabilize.'"

[end]
"[He] left. [I'm sorry but] it's winter, after all. Spring will bring somebody new. It always does."

Jack Mann, Beebo Brinker

# data[].attributes.body
"We should meet in another life, we should meet in air,
Me and you."

– Lesbos, Ariel

# data[].attributes.body
"I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets."

– Elm, Ariel

# data[].attributes.body
"...What would the dark
Do without fevers to eat?"

– The Jailor, Ariel

# data[].attributes.body
"Herr God, Herr Lucifer
Beware
Beware.

Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.

– Lady Lazarus, Ariel

# data[].attributes.body
"You wake up with a list of all the people you'd rather be. But you're already on everyone else's list."

– The Envy of Wishes, I Wrote This For You

# data[].attributes.body
"...maybe, one day, I'll settle for second best. And on that same day, hell will freeze over, the sun will burn out and the stars will fall from the sky."

– The Grim Alternatives, I Wrote This For You

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I hope you look out your window and remember
that my name will forever live in the stars.

– Moonlight, Flux

# data[].attributes.body
'i love myself.'
the
quietest.
simplest.
most
powerful.
revolution.
ever.

– ism, salt.

# data[].attributes.body
"...eat mist and guilt until we are but dreams."

– salt.

# data[].attributes.body
I.
When I was trying
to quit smoking
and we drank white wine
from Mason jars,
you called my freckles
cocoa powder
and I called your green eyes
celery.

– "All That's Left to Tell," Mouthful of Forevers

# data[].attributes.body
The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin
The City & The City by China Miéville
Dracula by Bram Stoker
White is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi
Experimental Film by Gemma Files

# data[].attributes.body
The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin
2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson
Lilith's Brood: Dawn by Octavia E. Butler
Neuromancer by William Gibson

# data[].attributes.body
"This year I learned that cities are beautiful from rooftops even when you're sad and that swimming in rivers while the sun sets in July will make you feel hopeful, no matter what's going on at home. I found out my best friend is strong enough to swing me over his shoulder like I'm weightless and run down the street while I'm squealing and kicking against his chest. I found out vegan rice milk whipped cream is delicious, especially when it's licked off the stomach of a boy you love."

– "This year," Mouthful of Forevers

# data[].attributes.body
"Less light! and the truth becomes more evident."

When I Was Miss Dow, Science Fiction: Stories and Contexts (77)

# data[].attributes.body
"If you evade suffering you also evade the chance at joy. Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but you will not be fulfilled. You will not know what it is to come home."

The Dispossessed (334)

# data[].attributes.body
"There's a point, around age twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities."

Bedap, The Dispossessed (249)

# data[].attributes.body
"The unconscious mind is coexistent with the universe."

The Dispossessed (222)

# data[].attributes.body
"All you have to do to see life whole is to see it as mortal. I'll die, you'll die; how could we love each other otherwise? The sun's going to burn out, what else keeps it shining?"

Shevek, The Dispossessed (190)

# data[].attributes.body
"Touch and go, brother, that's the rule. Never let yourself be owned."

Vokep, The Dispossessed (54)

# data[].attributes.body
"Having's wrong; sharing's right. What more can you share than your whole self, your whole life, all the nights and all the days?"

Gimar, The Dispossessed (50)

# data[].attributes.body
"Shifting slightly, [she] reached past my head toward the lamp above us. I caught her wrist. Her bones felt like velvet and quicksilver between my tingling fingers.

"No,"I whispered against the hollow of her ear. "In the light.""

Zami (167-168)

# data[].attributes.body
"I could smell her like the sharp breath of wildflowers."

Zami (167)

# data[].attributes.body
"I sat on the edge of my bed, wanting to put my arms around[her], to let the tenderness and love I felt burn away the sad casing around her and speak to her need through the touch of my hands and my mouth and my body that defined my own."

Zami (165)

# data[].attributes.body
"[She] was my friend, the only friend I had made in this strange town, and I loved her, but with caution. We had slept together. Did that mean we were lovers?"

Zami (140)

# data[].attributes.body
"Why don't you kiss me? I don't bite."

Ginger, Zami (136)

# data[].attributes.body
"The nature of water [...] is to flow. For water to be puzzled, to hesitate even for an instant, would be against its nature.

Intuitively one thinks of five as a devouring force. [....] The more a fire devours, the bigger it gets; the bigger it gets, the more its appetite grows; the more its appetite grows, the more it devours. All that refuses to be devoured by fire is water."

Diary of a Bad Year (215)

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"...if I am into something, I am wholly in, but if it doesn't work out, I put it behind me, it is finished, it doesn't exist anymore. That way I remain positive, that way I can look to the future."

Diary of a Bad Year (213)

# data[].attributes.body
"A preface to a story that will never be written."

Diary of a Bad Year (188)

# data[].attributes.body
"Why should not our every utterance come accompanied by a reminder that before too long we will have to say goodbye to this world?"

Diary of a Bad Year (167)

# data[].attributes.body
"The afterworld is a sad and subdued place."

Diary of a Bad Year (159)

# data[].attributes.body
"It is surprising that the notion of an individual afterlife persists in intellectually respectable versions of Christianity. It so transparently fills a lack ... that religion ought simply to note such incapacity as part of the human condition and leave it at that.

The persistence of the soul in an unrecognizable form, unknown to itself, without memory, without identity, is another question entirely."

Diary of a Bad Year (154)

# data[].attributes.body
"I close my eyes, a useless flutter. I open them, and I see you half a world away. I hear fever parting your lips. I feel your shiverings, colorless geckos running down your spine. I smell the night sweat that has bathed you clean."

Bình, The Book of Salt (220)

# data[].attributes.body
"He can make me open my legs but never my eyes."

Bình's mother, The Book of Salt (201)

# data[].attributes.body
"Are you so pissed drunk...that you think that I learned how to love, how to find passion in another man's body, from reading and writing?"

Bình, The Book of Salt (194)

# data[].attributes.body
"Sinners lack passion."

Miss Toklas, The Book of Salt (187)

# data[].attributes.body
"Every person and evrything has its own throb and rhythm."

Bình on GertrudeStein's obsession with automobiles, The Book of Salt (182)

# data[].attributes.body
"The end of the world begins with rain."

I'll Give You The Sun

# data[].attributes.body
"It's okay to be addicted to beauty. Emerson said 'Beauty is God's handwriting.' I'm addicted to it too. Most artists are."

Dianna, I'll Give You The Sun

# data[].attributes.body
I'll Give You The Sun by Jandy Nelson
Mouthful of Forevers by Clementine von Radics
salt. by Nayyirah Waheed
Flux by Orion Carloto
I Wrote This For You by pleasefindthis
Ariel by Sylvia Plath
Impulse by Ellen Hopkins
The Waves by Virginia Woolf

# data[].attributes.body
"You're really brave."
"I'm not, really. I'm scared all the time."
"What a brave thing to say."

Stone Butch Blues (101)

# data[].attributes.body
"I know you both loved each other a lot."
"Sometimes love just isn't enough."

Stone Butch Blues (100)

# data[].attributes.body
"There's so many things I wish I had told you. I never could find the words."

"Write me a letter someday."

Stone Butch Blues (165)

# data[].attributes.body
"Writing is a solipsistic operation."

Orality and Literacy (99)

# data[].attributes.body
"The dead flower, once alive, is the psychic equivalent of the verbal text. The paradox lies in the fact that the deadness of the text, its removal from the living human lifeworld, its rigid visual fixity, assures its endurance and its potential for being resurrected into limitless living contexts by a potentially infinite number of living readers."

Orality and Literacy (80)

# data[].attributes.body
"One of the most startling paradoxes inherent in writing is its close association with death."

Orality and Literacy (80)

# data[].attributes.body
"This uneasy relationship between writer and reader has a beginning; it was established for all time on a mysterious Mesopotamian afternoon. It is a fruitful but anachronic relationship between a primeval creator who gives birth at the moment of death, and a post-mortem creator, or rather generations of post-mortem creators who enable the creation itself to speak, and without whom all writing is dead. From its very start, reading is writing's apotheosis."

A History of Reading (179)

# data[].attributes.body
"The best time for reading a good stylish story is in fact when one is on a train travelling alone. With strangers roundabout, and unfamiliar scenery passing by the window (at which you glance now and again) the endearing and convoluted life coming out of the pages possesses its own peculiar and imprinting effects."

Alan Sillitoe, A History of Reading (152)

# data[].attributes.body
"Her mother does not believe in fiction: 'So many complications, so much passionate love in those novels.'"

A History of Reading (149)

# data[].attributes.body
"Allowing someone else to speak the words on a page for us is an experience far less personal than holding the book and following the text with our own eyes."

A History of Reading (123)