Alli

“The sleeping hound of addiction was alive and well in me. It leaped up at a moment’s notice. One cigarette a day went to two and then to forty in a week. And, yes, I knew about the Orange Stuff and the Yellow Stuff, too. (It’s what I drank with Bahadur the watchman in the graveyard.) But I had kept the hound on a tight leash. I had seen enough wreckage among the drugged-out hippies in Goa to know that my life depended on hanging on to that leash and never forgetting about the hound for one single second, even when it was pretending to be asleep.”
― Arundhati Roy, Mother Mary Comes to Me

“... It is not a curse to be confined to water.
Although to an onlooker, the poem argues, a fish might seem trapped in its pond—although to you and I, it may seem to know nothing of the world on land—it is not so. A fish can still admire the reflection of spring clouds on the water. It can still taste the blossoms that dapple its surface and imagine itself swimming among the trees. It understands more than we will ever realize.
His words were so beautiful, so vivid, that I could almost hear that injured fish speaking to me from amidst its suffering: Do not pity me.
My life might be smaller than yours, but it is full of joy and worth living.
Do not assume that I dream of greatness. Do not assume that I wish to be reborn in a different time or a different place, in a different life. I wish only to admire the blossoms in this one.
Do not pity me—for I am exuberant!”
― Shen Tao, The Poet Empress

“Let us lie here forever. Let us be buried as wild things are, by tooth and claw and worm. Let the grasses grow up through the sockets of our eyes. Let them find us in seven years or seventy, and let their brows furrow, because they cannot tell my bones from yours.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Everlasting

“Everyone who tells a story leaves a part of themselves inside it”
― Shen Tao, The Poet Empress