Isabella

“I walked through a forest near a highway until I found a clump of moss to sleep on and remembered that Simon said possums were not indigenous to New Zealand, that they had been brought here by somebody a long time ago, some European, and since there were no animals here that liked to kill possums, all those unkilled possums had fucked up the whole fucking ecosystem by eating plants, too many plants, by wanting so much, and now there were what? --ten or fifteen possums per person in New Zealand? Something fucked up like that; and I imagined my dozen fucked-up possums gathered around me, a personal audience, and I wondered which things inside a person might be indigenous or nonindigenous, but it isn’t as easy to trace those kinds of things in a person as it is in a country. I wished that I could point to some colonizer and blame him for everything that was nonindigenous in me, whoever or whatever had fucked my ecosystem, had made me misunderstand myself--but I couldn’t blame anyone for what was in me, because I am, like everyone, populated entirely by myself,”
― Catherine Lacey, Nobody Is Ever Missing

“No one is anything more than a slow event and I knew I was not a woman but a series of movements, not a life, but a shake, and this put a knot in my throat and a pause in my breathing and it turned in my stomach, to know that my stomach was not a stomach but a turn and my breath was nothing if it did not move and my throat without voice was just some slowly decaying meat but I had nothing to say anymore, not yet, and BELINDA refilled my coffee and the surface rolled and rippled and then it almost stilled but not quite because it shook as it will always shake and I watched it keep shaking.”
― Catherine Lacey, Nobody Is Ever Missing

“Once the spark catches, once the prepared, courageous combination of camp, melody, enigma, fantasy, paranoia, electric guitars, shock, male make-up and flirtation took hold, and he found himself at last in the right place at the right time, nothing can stop the momentum from growing. Repressed fantasies, forbidden pleasures, rule-breaking spirit and highly suggestive erotic discrepancies are released with tremendous force into the mainstream. They make it there mostly through Bowie’s insatiable mind and body, which has adopted the perfect disguise of an ambiguously sexy, deadly smart and attractively damaged pop star.”
― Paul Morley, The Age of Bowie: How David Bowie Made a World of Difference

“I had a cat I could not see,
Because it stayed in back of me.
It was a very loyal pet-
It's sad we never really met.

I had a nice pet
Who I never met,
Remember it always stayed behind me.
And I'm sure it was a cat, too.”
― Peggy Rathmann, Ruby the Copycat