Lane Pybas

“Part of what you have to figure out in this life is, Who would I be if I hadn’t been frightened? What hurt me, and what would I be if it hadn’t?”
― Patricia Lockwood, Priestdaddy: A Memoir

“And for you, I think, a religious life,' she said, a calm certainty all over her crisscrossed face. She didn't even bother with a question mark. My calling was so obvious; it was written all over me. Two years later, I would be living in my own convent as an order of one, typing poetry in the deep glowing hours to a stranger. Four close walls and cathedral space within, arriving with a rush to myself every moment.”
― Patricia Lockwood, Priestdaddy

“Who among us is not the great I AM? Who among us doesn't live in a nightgown or some other bare-ass outfit at the center of his own wide sky--shining, unchanging, without beginning or end, a word in the east and a body in the west?”
― Patricia Lockwood, Priestdaddy

“You come to me, you appear to me in the night, the fact that you're not here appears to me, that I can't tell you this even though I pretend like I can, not being able to ever tell you is still something I can't understand. That you could have taken so long to decompose, too, that, too, I can't believe there's still so much left of you, down there, buried, hair and things like that, skin. I don't want to take anything, I never wanted to, and I would give (I don't know what, not everything because you wouldn't be there, but I'd give a lot) so much to be able to tell you, for real, to see you, to sing a song with you, shout it out hugging each other, have you over to my apartment, for you to get to know my house and my boyfriend, the one I have now, and have him get to know you and have you tell me which one's better, which one you like better, if it's Juli, if it's him, even though obviously you would like Manuel better, and in reality you wouldn't care about either of them, because the two of us is enough, there's nothing else, we never needed anything else, although we did.”
― Romina Paula, Agosto