The Passion Quotes

“You love her, don't you?' [Rob] said to Gabriel.
Gabriel finall seemed able to break their locked stare. He looked away, at the carpet. His face was bleak.
Yes' he said
More than anything,' Rob persisted. 'You'd crawl on your belly over broken glass for her. Easy.'
Yes, damn you,' Gabriel said. 'Happy now?”
― L.J. Smith, The Passion

“Kaitlyn is that kind of girl that might be too interesting, might tempt you to get involved... A girl who challenged him, who could be my equal... Her mind was a place of blue pools and blazing meteors... She stood slim and proud as some medival witch princess against dawn."

-Gabriel”
― L.J. Smith, The Passion

“Gabriel came out a moment later, while Kaitlyn was still standing motionless by the stairs. He was shrugging into his T-shirt. He looked particularly handsome in a just-roused, early morning way. His hair was very wavy, as if someone had run fingers through it to release the curl, his eyes were hooded and lazy and there was a faint smile of satisfaction on his lips.
Kaitlyn discovered that she wanted to kill him. The image that came to her mind was of hitting him with a rolling pin, but not in an amusing, comic-book sort of way.”
― L.J. Smith, The Passion

“And so, from the first, we separated our pleasure. She lay on the rug and I lay at right angles to her so that only our lips might meet. Kissing in this way is the strangest of distractions. The greedy body that clamors for satisfaction is forced to content itself with a single sensation and, just as the blind hear more acutely and the deaf can feel the grass grow, so the mouth becomes the focus of love and all things pass through it and are re-defined. It is a sweet and precise torture.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Passion

“He liked me because I am short. I flatter myself. He did not dislike me. He liked no one except Josephine and he liked her the way he liked chicken.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Passion

“For what was your gesture? An act of pure love for Jesus particularly. It was an act so completely focused upon the Christ that not a dram of worldly benefit was gained thereby. Nothing could justify the spillage of some three hundred days' wages, except love alone. [...] The disciples, in fact, were offended by an act that produced nothing, accomplished nothing, fed no poor, served no need. They reproached you as a wastrel. They were offended by the absurd, an act devoted absolutely to love, to love alone. But Jesus called it 'beautiful.”
― Walter Wangerin Jr., Reliving the Passion

“How else could it be with such consuming hair?”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Passion

“This is MY FATHER'S House - not a bank!!!'
'What's got into Him??' 'Low blood sugar?' 'Hey Judas - get the coins!”
― Larry Gonick, The Cartoon History of the Universe II, Vol. 8-13: From the Springtime of China to the Fall of Rome

“Day of the Dogwood by Stewart Stafford

If I opened my veins,
With the Saviour’s nails,
Will your bloodlust go?
Where compassion failed?

Do I sweat out blood now?
Or is it your crown of thorns?
Miracles to silvered treachery,
Pure as first Christmas morn.

Scattered flock, shepherd leaves,
Can you sheep know what you do?
Such immaculate deception, but,
Know this sacred heart was true.

© Stewart Stafford, 2023. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“It’s hard to remember that this day will never come again. That the time is now and the place is here and that there are no second chances at a single moment. During the days that Bonaparte stayed in Boulogne, there was a feeling of urgency and privilege. He woke before us and slept along after us, going through every detail of our training and rallying us personally. He stretched his hand towards the Channel and made England sound as though she already belonged to us. To each of us. That was his gift. He became the focus of our lives. The thought of fighting excited us. No one wants to be killed but the hardship, the long hours, the cold, the orders were things we would have endured anyway on the farms or in the towns. We were not free men. He made sense out of dullness.”
― janette winterson

“When we came here, we came from our mothers and our sweethearts. We were still used to our mothers with their work-hard arms that could clout the strongest of us and leave our ears ringing. And we courted our sweethearts in the country way. Slow, with the fields that ripen at harvest. Fierce, with the sows that rut the earth. Here, without women, with only our imaginations and a handful of whores, we can’t remember what it is about women that can turn a man through passion into something holy. Bible words again, but I am thinking of my father, who shaded his eyes on those sunburnt evenings and learned to take his time with my mother. I am thinking of my mother with her noisy heart and of all the women waiting in the fields for the men who drowned yesterday and all the mothers’ sons who have taken their place.

We never think of them here. We think of their bodies and now and then we talk about home but we don’t think of them as they are; the most solid, the best loved, the well known.

They go on. Whatever we do or undo, they go on.”
― janette winterson

“New recruits cry when they come here and they think about their mothers and their sweethearts and they think about going home. They remember what it is about home that holds their hearts; not sentiment or show but faces they love. Most of these recruits aren’t seventeen and they’re asked to do in a few weeks. What vexes the best philosophers for a lifetime; that is, to gather of their passion for life and make sense of it in the face of death.

They don’t know how, but they do know how to forget, and little by little they put aside the burning summer in their body, and all they have instead is lust and rage.”
― janette winterson

“The body clings to life at any cost. It even eats itself. When there’s no food, it turns cannibal and devours its fat, then its muscle then its bones. I’ve seen soldiers, mad with hunger and cold, chop off their own arms and cook them. How long could you go on chopping? Both arms. Both legs. Ears. Slices from the trunk. You could chop yourself down to the very end and leave the heart to beat in its ransacked palace.

No. Take the heart first. Then you don’t feel the cold so much. The pain so much. With the heart gone, there’s no reason to stay your hand. Your eyes can look on death and not tremble. It’s the heart that betrays us, makes us weep, makes us bury our friends when we should be marching ahead. It’s the heart that sickens us at night and makes us hate who we are. It’s the heart that sings old songs and brings memories of warm days and makes us waver at another mile, another smoldering village.

To survive the zero winter and that war we made a pyre of our hearts and put them aside forever. There’s no pawnshop for the heart. You can’t take it in and leave it awhile in a clean cloth and redeem it in better times.

You can’t make sense of your passion for life in the face of death, you can only give up your passion. Only then can you begin to survive.

And if you refuse?

If you felt for every man you murdered, every life you broke in two, every slow and painful harvest you destroyed, every child whose future you stole, madness would throw her noose around your neck and lead you into the dark woods where the rivers are polluted, and the birds are silent.

When I say I lived with heartless men, I use the word correctly.”
― janette winterson

“He didn’t believe in the future, only the present, and as our future, our years, had turned so relentlessly into identical presents, I understood him more. Eight years had passed, and I was still at war, cooking chickens, waiting to go home for good. Eight years of talking about the future, and seeing it, turn into the present. Years of thinking, ‘in another year, I’ll be doing something different,’ and in another year doing just the same.

Future. Crossed out.

That’s what the war does.”
― janette winterson

“When I think of that night, here in this place where I will always be, my hands tremble and my muscles ache. I lose all sense of day or night, I lose all sense of my work, writing this story, trying to convey to you what really happened. Trying not to make up too much. I can think of it by mistake, my eyes blurring the words in front of me, my pen lifting and staying lifted, I can think of it for hours, and yet it is always the same moment I think of. Her hair as she bent over me, red with streaks of gold, her hair on my face and chest and looking up at her through her hair. She let it fall over me and I felt I was lying in the long grass, safe.”
― janette winterson

“Last year Villanelle came by in her boat, as close as she could get, and let off fireworks. One exploded so high that I almost touched it and for a second, I thought I might drop down after those falling rays and touch her too, once more. Once more, what difference could it make to be near her again? Only this. That if I start to cry, I will never stop.”
― janette winterson