Ludmilla Ultiskaya, The Funeral Party

"Alik! Alik!" she called him, touched him, stroked him. She put her lips to his ilac crest and drew her tongue across to his navel, along the line which divides the human body in two. The smell of him was strange, his skin tasted bitter; she had been marinating him in this bitterness for two months now.

Charles Wright, "Snow," Country Music

If we, as we are, are dust, and dust, as it will, rises,
Then we will rise, and recongregate
In the wind, the cloud, and be their issue

Luce Irigaray, The Way of Love

For there to be an exchange, it is essential that the other touch us, particularly through words.

...

To go toward one another requires the elaboration of other space-times than those in which we...are accustomed to living.

Ellen Peckham, "Autumn," RATTLE (Summer 2008)

Red fence leaning not yet against
not yet snow.

George Oppen, "Animula," New Collected Poems

Chance and chance and thereby starlit
All that was to be thought
Yes
Comes down the road       Air of the waterfronts       black air

Over the iron bollard       the doors cracked

In the starlight things the things continue
Narrative    their long instruction and the tide running
Strong as a tug's wake    shorelights'

Maile Meloy, "Tome," Half in Love

As it changed, as the clouds stretched out and the orange flared up and pink reached out to meet the blue, I started thinking of it as a description, a letter, not a lawyer-sounding one, and not a tome, but a start, an account for Sawyer and for me of what the day did out here, and what it was like.


Image from Tome: A Chamber Opera in One Act, by Gregory Bryant Bolin, libretto by Maile Meloy, based on her story, "Tome."

Hayden Carruth, "Footnote to Suicide," Reluctantly

People who commit suicide and survive are defensive about it. Afterward they say either "I didn't mean to do it," signifying their savoir faire, or "I did mean to do it," signifying their seriousness. In either case they are uneasy. On one hand they don't want to be thought crazy; on the other they don't want to be thought frivolous or half-hearted. The latter is the case with me. I really meant it and when I arrived at the emergency room I was clinically dead. So when I refer to the event I always say that I committed suicide, not that I attempted suicide.

Ron Carlson, Ron Carlson Writes a Story

All the valuable writing I've done in the last ten years has been done in the first twenty minutes after the first time I've wanted to leave the room.

Christopher Hitchens, "Just Causes," Foreign Affairs (Sept./Oct. 2008)

Surely, identifying the situation that is appropriate for [humanitarian] intervention is both an art and a science, but history has taught us that tyranny often looks stronger than it really is, that it has unexpected vulnerabilities (very often to do with the blunt fact that tyranny, as such, is incapable of self-analysis), and that taking a stand on principle, even if not immediately rewarded with pragmatic results, can be an excellent dress rehearsal for the real thing.

Mathias Svalina, Creation Myths

In the beginning people had cornfields rather than sex parts. They had to attend to them every day or they would grow weedy & wild.

William H. Gass, "The Pedersen Kid," In the Heart of the Heart of the Country

He'd gone off this way yet there was nothing now to show he'd gone; nothing like a bump of black in a trough or an arm or leg sticking out of the side of a bank like a branch had blown down or a horse's head uncovered like a rock; nowhere Pedersen's fences had kept bare he might be lying huddled with the horse on its haunches by him; nothing even in the shadows shrinking while I watched to take for something hard and not of snow and once alive.

Qur'an, 4:75

And what is wrong with you that you fight not in the cause of God and for those weak, ill-treated and oppressed among men, women, and children, whose cry is: Our Lord! Rescue us from this town whose people are oppressors; and raise for us from You one who will protect, and raise for us from You one who will help.

Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

When we deal with cities we are dealing with life at its most complex and intense. Because this is so, there is a basic esthetic limitation on what can be done with cities: A city cannot be a work of art.

Charles C Mann, "1491," Best American Science Writing 2003

As for the Indians, evidence suggests that they often viewed Europeans with disdain. The Hurons, a chagrined missionary reported, thought the French possessed 'little intelligence in comparison to themselves.' Europeans, Indians said, were physically weak, sexually untrustworthy, atrociously ugly, and just plain dirty. (Spaniards, who seldom if ever bathed, were amazed by the Aztec desire for personal cleanliness.) A Jesuit reported that the 'Savages' were disgusted by handkerchiefs: 'They say, we place what is unclean in a fine white piece of linen, and put it away in our pockets as something very precious, while they throw it upon the ground.' The Micmac scoffed at the notion of French superiority. If Christian civilization was so wonderful, why were its inhabitants leaving?

Catherine Zeidler, "Christina the Astonishing," Mississippi Review Online

“You always want to orgy,” said Christina. “Tonight we're fishing. Everything we catch we eat at sunrise on the glass beach.”

Nolan Chessman, "Bay of Smokes," DIAGRAM

I came to your town
and saw boulders
spilling off
the mtn.

Anthony Doerr, "The Hunter's Wife," The Atlantic Monthly

"Want to know what he dreams?" she asked. Her voice echoed up through the tree and poured from the shorn ends of its hollowed branches. The hunter took his knife from his coat. "Summer," her voice echoed. "Blackberries. Trout. Dredging his flanks across river pebbles."

Stacey Richter, "The Cavemen in the Hedges," Zoetrope: All-Story

There are cavemen in the hedges again. I take the pellet gun from the rack beside the door and go out back and try to run them off. These cavemen are tough sons of bitches who are impervious to pain, but they love anything shiny, so I load the gun up with golden Mardi Gras beads my girlfriend, Kim, keeps in a bowl on the dresser and aim toward their ankles.

Richard Flanagan, Gould's Book of Fish

Because it clearly was too big a burden for God, this business of reminding people about being other than hungry dust, and really the only wonder is that He persevered with it for so long before giving up.

Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust

Where does it start? Muscles tense. One leg a pillar, holding the body upright between the earth and sky. The other a pendulum, swinging from behind. Heel touches down. The whole weight of the body rolls forward onto the ball of the foot. The big toe pushes off, and the delicately balanced weight of the body shifts again. The legs reverse position. It starts with a step and then another step and then another that adds up like taps on a drum to a rhythm, the rhythm of walking. The most obvious and the most obscure thing in the world, this walking that wanders so readily into religion, philosophy, landscape, urban policy, anatomy, allegory, and heartbreak.

Ulrich Straus, The Anguish of Surrender: Japanese POWs of World War II

He also declined to sleep on his bed and took care not to come near his stove. His only activity was to read newspapers and books. He made every effort to avoid having his picture taken, to the extent of burning tobacco his guard had given him and using the embers to disfigure his face.

Dawn Raffel, "Up the Old Goat Road," The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories

It is winter already and the ice is full of fish, my mother says. We have the recipes engraved on a laminated log. We have lanyards and all-purpose holiday plums. We have edible leaves. We have drawstring hoods. This is smart, my mother says. But we are winded and it smells like snow.

Rick Bass, "The Hermit's Story," The Hermit's Story

Such is the nature of the kinds of people living, scattered here and there, in this valley.

Thurgood Marshall, "Remarks on the Bicentennial of the Constitution," Classics of American Political & Constitutional Thought

Nor do I find the wisdom, foresight, and sense of justice exhibited by the framers particularly profound. To the contrary, the government they devised was defective from the start, requiring several amendments, a civil war, and momentous social transformation to attain the system of constitutional government, and its respect for the individual freedoms and human rights, we hold as fundamental today.