"When I was a girl I didn't know/I was a girl. I thought I was/more of a pigment, a choral tone,/some kind of weather that disrupts everyone's life in the living room."
— Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg (Animals In The House)

"I live just south of the poetic,/where the glaciers stopped short, sloped down/to nothing"
— Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg (Animals In The House)

""but why do only unimportant things?" asked milo, who suddenly remembered how much time he spent each day doing them.

"think of all the trouble it saves," the man explained, and his face looked as if he'd be grinning an evil grin--if he could grin at all. "if you only do the easy and useless jobs, you'll never have to worry about the important ones which are so difficult. you just won't have the time. for there's always something to do to keep you from what you really should be doing, and if it weren't for that dreadful magic staff, you'd never know how much time you were wasting.""
— norman juster (from the phantom tollbooth)

""I want to throw up because we're supposed to quietly and politely make house in this killing machine called America and pay taxes to support our own slow murder and I'm amazed we're not running amok in the streets, and that we can still be capable of gestures of loving after lifetimes of all this."
"
— David Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration, p. 108

"And when you get down to it, Lily, that is the only purpose grand enough for a human life. Not just to love but to persist in love."
— Sue Monk Kidd