“I lay back in an abandonment of happiness and gave myself up to your scandalously indiscreet caresses, in full view of the whole theater! Not ladylike perhaps! But then I had never known what it was like to be a lady! Then we drove back in the dark taxi, and the chauffeur smiled knowingly and sympathetically at you. Then the flat, the deserted, unutterably romantic Palais Royal, Julian’s [Vita’s] impatience, Julian’s roughness, Julian’s clumsy, fumbling hands …My God! I can’t bear to think of it!”
Violet Keppel(Trefusis), from a letter to Vita Sackville-West, c. 1919
“It always seemed to me that the herbaceous peony is the very epitome of June. Larger than any rose, it has something of the cabbage rose’s voluminous quality; and when it finally drops from the vase, it sheds its petticoats with a bump on the table, all in an intact heap, much as a rose will suddenly fall, making us look up from our book or conversation, to notice for one moment the death of what had still appeared to be a living beauty.”
Anne Sexton said, “As for me, I am watercolor. I wash off.” and Emily Dickinson said, “I am out with lanterns, looking for myself.” and Chuck Palahniuk said, “If death meant just leaving the stage long enough to change costume and come back as a new character… Would you slow down? Or speed up?” and Vita Sackville-West said, “Homesick we are, and always, for another And different world.” and Clarice Lispector said, “For one has the right to shout. So, I am shouting.” and Chelsea Hodson said, “I might be better as an idea, you said, and it was hard not to agree- everyone is better as a theory.” and Charles Bukowski said, “We have come so far and gone nowhere. We have lived so long and hardly at all.” and Jose Saramago said, “And here I am, trapped between today and the future and with no hope in either of them.” and Virginia Woolf said, “Do you still believe in life by the way?” and I am thinking about how badly I want to feel like I take up space.
When they said, “You think attention is love and that’s why you suffer so deeply.” and when Mary Lambert said, “I only know how to exist when I am wanted.” and when Chuck Palahniuk said, “And I hate how I don’t feel real unless people are watching.” and when he said “What I want is to be needed. What I need is to be indispensable to somebody.” and when Alice Hoffman said, “She liked to disappear, even when she was in the same room as other people.” and when Vita Sackville-West said, “She loves in a way that will make her suffer horribly.” and when Tahereh Mafi said, “I want you to make a list of all your favorite things, and I want to be on it.” and when Charles Bukowski said, “With me, you’re number one and there isn’t even a number two.” and when-
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