Ari

“Jenie waited a bloom time, and a green time and an orange time. But when the pollen again gilded the sun and sifted down on the world she began to stand around the gate and expect things. What things. She didn't know exactly. She knew things that nobody had ever told her. For instance, the words of the trees and the wind. She often spoke to falling seeds and said, 'Ah hope you fall on soft ground,' because she had heard the seeds saying that to each other as they passed. She knew the world was a stallion rolling in the blue pasture of ether. She knew that God tore down the old world every evening and built a new one by sun-up. It was wonderful to see it take form with the sun and emerge from the grey dust of its making. The familiar people and things had failed her so she hung over the gate and looked up the road towards way off. She knew now that marriage did not make love. Janie's first dream was dead, so she became a woman.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“Though a little frightened, she let him have his way, and the reckless, shameless sensuality shook her to her foundations, stripped her to the very last, and made a different woman of her. It was not really love. It was not voluptuousness. It was sensuality sharp and searing as fire, burning the soul to tinder. Burning out the shames, the deepest, oldest shames, in the most secret places. It cost her an effort to let him have his way and his will of her. She had to be a passive, consenting thing, like a slave, a physical slave. Yet the passion licked around her, consuming, and when the sensual flame of it pressed through her bowels and breast, she really thought she was dying: yet a poignant, marvellous death.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover

“One half of the face was alertly contemplating the world with expectation and confidence while the other half had fallen under the weight of it. The eyes expressed the fatigue and rancour of a small, hardworking person carrying her life around on her back like a set of symbols and circumstances that she could stand apart from and arrange.”
― Mary Gaitskill, Bad Behavior

“He stooped to the evil of hypocrisy with others, sceptical of their innocence which he could cajole so easily.”
― James Joyce, A Portait of the Artist as a Young Man