Lizzie

“Because I could not stop for death
he kindly stopped for me
I asked to see a photograph
confirming his identity

The faces matched - the eyes were warm -
the hair was long and grey -
both smiled but as I tried to move
death blocked my way.

No no, my sweetheart, what's the rush?
Come on, let's go to bed,
there's time for love, there's surely time
for happiness - death said.

His voice was soft, his skin was pale,
his fingers brushed my face -
Oh? time for love? I said - but where?
He said: I know a place.

He led me down a flowered track
and on a bank of earth
he loved me till my body screamed
from every living nerve.

I slept then for eternity
drugged as I was with love:
death bent down to my sleeping face
and on earth's pillow made a place
to leave his photograph.”
― Martin Crimp, Cyrano de Bergerac: in a free adaptation

“I think of how keenly I've been wrong. I think of all the gods I have made out of feeble men.”
― Raven Leilani, Luster

“But I didn’t and still don’t like making a cult of women’s knowledge, preening ourselves on knowing things men don’t know, women’s deep irrational wisdom, women’s instinctive knowledge of Nature, and so on. All that all too often merely reinforces the masculinist idea of women as primitive and inferior – women’s knowledge as elementary, primitive, always down below at the dark roots, while men get to cultivate and own the flowers and crops that come up into the light. But why should women keep talking baby talk while men get to grow up? Why should women feel blindly while men get to think?”
― Ursula K. Le Guin

“How could we explain that standing on a stage and speaking someone else's words as if they are your own is less an act of bravery than a desperate lunge at mutual understanding?”
― M.L. Rio, If We Were Villains