Joshua

“Slowly I married her. Slowly and bitterly married her love / married her body in boredom and joy. Slowly I came to her bed and came to her table in hunger and habit came to be fed. Slowly I married her sanctioned by none with nobody's name / amid general warnings / amid general scorn. Came to her fragrance by nostrils wide. Came to her greed with seed for a child. Years in the coming and years in retreat / slowly I married her / slowly I kneeled and now we are wounded so deep and so well that no one can hurt us except Death itself.”
― Leonard Cohen, Death of a Lady's Man

“At the local coffee-shop, hunched in one of the secretive, high-backed booths with hundreds of peoples' names gouged into the wood, we drank cup after cup of black coffee and talked frankly about sex.”
― Sylvia Plath

“men cannot know each other till they have ‘eaten salt together’;”
― Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

“Winter is for women —
The woman, still at her knitting,
At the cradle of Spanish walnut,
Her body a bulb in the cold and too dumb to think.
Will the hive survive, will the gladiolas
Succeed in banking their fires
To enter another year?
What will they taste of, the Christmas roses?
The bees are flying. They taste the spring.

— Sylvia Plath, from “Wintering,” Ariel. (Harper & Row 1966)”
― Sylvia Plath, Ariel