"I am offering this poem to you, since I have nothing else to give." ~Jimmy Santiago Baca
“Yes, I was infatuated with you: I am still. No one has ever heightened such a keen capacity of physical sensation in me. I cut you out because I couldn’t stand being a passing fancy. Before I give my body, I must give my thoughts, my mind, my dreams. And you weren’t having any of those.”
– Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
“I am only responsible for my own heart, you offered yours up for the smashing my darling. Only a fool would give out such a vital organ.”
– Anaïs Nin
“He who does not understand your silence will probably not understand your words.”
“As she bends for a Kleenex in the dark, I am thinking of other girls: the girl I loved who fell in love with a lion—she lost her head over it—we just necked a lot; of the girl who fell in love with the tightrope, got addicted to getting high wired and nothing else was enough; all the beautiful, damaged women who have come through my life and I wonder what would have happened if I’d met them sooner, what they were like before they were so badly wounded. All this time I thought I’d been kissing, but maybe I’m always doing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, kissing dead girls in hopes that the heart will start again. Where there’s breath, I’ve heard, there’s hope.”
– Daphne Gottlieb, Kissing Dead Girls
“It often happens that the real tragedies of life happen in such an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of style. They affect us just as vulgarity affects us. They give us an impression of sheer brute force, and we revolt against that. Sometimes however a tragedy of artistic elements of beauty crosses our lives. If these elements of beauty are real, the whole thing simply appeals to our sense of dramatic effect. Suddenly we find that we are no longer the actors, but the spectators. Or rather we are both. We watch ourselves, and the mere wonder of the spectacle enthrall us”
– Oscar Wilde, The Picture Of Dorian Gray
Words ... for the Time Being 