"The weight of the world is love.
Under the burden of solitude,
under the burden of dissatisfaction
the weight,the weight we carry is love. "
— Allen Ginsberg

"Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes clean to the bone."
— Dorothy Parker

"Happiness consists in realizing it is all a great strange dream"
— Jack Kerouac

"Belize: The white cracker who wrote the National Anthem knew what he was doing. He set the word "free" to a note so high nobody could reach it. That was deliberate. "
— Tony Kushner

"when you educate yourself about clitoredectomies, infibulation, forced prostitution, rape as a war tactic, patriarchal religions, women painters, filmmakers, poets, writers, activists, politicians, sex-industry workers, historians, archelogoists and musicians, that’s self-protection."
— Inga Muscio (Cunt: A Declaration of Independence)

"Your thighs are appletrees. Your knees are a southern breeze."
— William Carlos Williams (The Farmer's Daughters: Collected Short Stories)

"How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard."
— A.A. Milne (Winnie-the-Pooh)

"Perhaps it is better to wake up after all, even to suffer, rather than to remain a dupe to illusions all one's life."
— Kate Chopin (The Awakening, and Selected Stories)

"Only a house, quiet as snow, a space for myself to go, clean as paper before the poem."
— Sandra Cisneros (The House on Mango Street)

"I've had more difficulty accepting myself as bisexual than I ever did accepting that I was a lesbian. It felt traitorous. A few years ago, I admitted to myself that I was still interested in men in more than a "Brad Pitt is slick hot sexy" kind of way. But I worried whatmy friends, exes, and the Community would think. I never even broached the subject with my parents. Because what bothered me the most was that people would think that being a lesbian had been a phase for me, when that was so very not the case. What I feared was that I would no longer be part of a community, that I might be seen with my boyfriend and not be recognized as something not the same. "
— R. Gay (First Person Queer: Who We Are)

"My first female lover was a Jewish woman. She was butch, but not in a swaggering macho way- she could pass as a yeshiva boy, pale and intense. Small, almost fragile, she exuded a powerful sense of herself. She had not been to a synagogue in years, but kept the law of kashrut, and taught me my first prayers in Hebrew. She cooked, she read, she ironed her dress shirts and polished her boots meticulously, and admired femme women enormously. She was also the first person ever- including myself- to bring me to multiple orgasms. She taught me to ask for what I wanted in bed, then encouraged me to expect it from her and future lovers. She taught me to get her off with fingers, tongue, lips, sex toys, and my voice. She showed me how to masturbate in different positions, and fisted me during my menstrual cramps to provide an internal massage- and to demonstrate that a sexual act without orgasm was also an acceptable, intimate act. She never separated sexuality from the rest of her life; it was as integral to her as her Judaism.

This was how I wanted to be. Not just sexually, although certainly that way too. This is how I wanted to move through the world.

-- Karen Taylor (from "Daughters of Zelophehad") "
— Lawrence Schimel (First Person Queer: Who We Are)

"I am not a proponent of the We're Just Like You Except For What We Do In Bed philosophy - it is nonetheless true that in some ways our lives are not always all that dissimilar. I, too, walk my dog and worry about the consistency of his poop- even if I may share my dog with my queer femme ex-partner who maintains a separate household, which is next door to her best friend who is my former lover and owned boy and also a transsexual to boot."
— S. Bear Bergman (from First Person Queer)