If you see a man who's broken pick him up and carry him If you see a woman who's broken pull her all into your arms Cause we don't know where we come from We don't know what we are --Laurie Anderson I just don't care what happens next It looks like freedom but it feels like death It's something in between, I guess It's closing time. --Leonard Cohen I woke in bits, like all children, piecemeal over the years. I discovered myself and the world, and forgot them, and discovered them again. I woke at intervals until ... the intervals of waking tipped the scales, and I was more often awake than not. I noticed this process of waking, and predicted with terrifying logic that one of these years not far away I would be awake continuously and never slip back and never be free of myself again. --Annie Dillard I honor the things that you respect and I value the things that you cherish. I am not better than you. You are not better than me. Nobody is better than anybody else. Nobody is who you think they are at first glance. We need to see beyond the projections we cast onto each other. Each of us is so much grander, more nuanced, and more extraordinary than anybody thinks, including ourselves. --Clemantine Wamariya & Elizabeth Weil ... may have chosen to enter the space of silence, a space where power is no longer an issue, gender is no longer an issue, voice is no longer an issue, where the idea of a printed book appears as a trap. --Susan Howe And the restless endless rivers swept by, whispering in the rain, little warm tin worlds, whirring through the night at one mile every minute, carring the loved and unloved, the broken and the undefeated, carrying hate, guile, boredom, exhaustion, pain, joy, laughter, bitterness, frenzy, greed, pride and desire. Neon blinked. The rain came down. The world was moving. All the minutes had been counted. --John D. Macdonald Has anyone supposed it lucky to be born? I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and I know it. --Walt Whitman Grieving, one is thrust into a new life -- an unwelcome life. It takes time for that life to become familiar, to feel like the life you are actually living. You can be happy again, but you can never be happy and the same again. --Sallie Tisdale No book ends on the last page. No book begins on the first page. No last, no first -- only the page being read. --Wil, A Grip of Time, Lauren Kessler To each is given its moment in the blaze, its spark to be surrendered to another when it is sent, so that the blaze may go on. None may deny its spark to the general blaze and live forever. Each is sent to another someday. You are sent; you are on your way. I am sent. To the wolf or the lion or the vulture or the grasses, I am sent. My death is the life of another, and I will stand again in the windswept grasses and look through the eyes of the fox and take the air with the eagle and run in the track of the deer. --Daniel Quinn in the blackness of the pine in the paleness of the moon ... you offer me arms to take up you offer me arms to wake up in and we'll put pain away sing the heavens to sleep ah, let's not talk now --Jane Siberry The world pours in and overflows the heart until speech is useless ... --Kim Stanley Robinson