Nikki

“A returned battalion of the National Guard paraded through the streets with open ranks for their dead and then stepped down out of romance forever and sold you things over the counters of local stores.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald

“You can dance.
You can make me laugh.
You've got x-ray eyes.

You know how to sing.
You're a diplomat.
You've got it all.
Everybody loves you.

You can charm the birds out of the sky, But I, I've got
one thing.

You always know just what to say
And when to go,
But I've got one thing.

You can see in the dark,
But I've got one thing:
I loved you better.

Last night I woke up,
Saw this angel.
He flew in my window.
And he said,
Girl, pretty proud of yourself, huh?" And I looked around and said,
Who me?"
And he said, "The higher you fly, the faster you fall."

He said, "Send it up.
Watch it rise.
See it fall,
Gravity's rainbow.
Send it up.
Watch it rise.
See it fall,
Gravity's Angel.”
― Laurie Anderson

“I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.”
― Anais Nin

“His lyrical whistle beckoned me to adventure and forgetting. But I didn't want to forget. Hugging my grudge, ugly and prickly, a sad sea urchin, I trudged off on my own, in the opposite direction toward the forbidding prison. As from a star I saw, coldly and soberly, the separateness of everything. I felt the wall of my skin; I am I. That stone is a stone. My beautiful fusion with the things of this world was over.
The Tide ebbed, sucked back into itself. There I was, a reject, with the dried black seaweed whose hard beads I liked to pop, hollowed orange and grapefruit halves and a garbage of shells. All at once, old and lonely, I eyed these-- razor clams, fairy boats, weedy mussels, the oyster's pocked gray lace (there was never a pearl) and tiny white "ice cream cones." You could always tell where the best shells were-- at the rim of the last wave, marked by a mascara of tar. I picked up, frigidly, a stiff pink starfish. It lay at the heart of my palm, a joke dummy of my own hand. Sometimes I nursed starfish alive in jam jars of seawater and watched them grow back lost arms. On this day, this awful birthday of otherness, my rival, somebody else, I flung the starfish against a stone. Let it perish.”
― Sylvia Plath, Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams: Short Stories, Prose and Diary Excerpts