Burt Shuster

“I’m pretty sure she’s got an angel job now where she plucks a large handful of flowers and carries them up to God where they will bloom even brighter than on earth.”
 
Can we ask God to bring her back home?”
You know what, she’s already home.” Starla patted her chest. “She’ll always be right here in our hearts.”
But I can’t give her a hug.”
 
Yes, you can . . . if you hug yourself or me or Willa or Daddy or Big Pop or GoGo you’re hugging her because she’s a part of us.”
― JoDee Neathery, A Kind of Hush

“I believe that there are people who think as I do, who have thought as I do, who will think as I do. There are those who will live, unconscious of me, but continuing my attitude, so to speak, as I continue, unknowingly, the similar attitude of those before me. I could write and write. All it takes is a motion of the hand in response to a brain impulse, trained from childhood to record in our own American brand of hieroglyphics the translations of external stimuli. How much of my brain is wilfully my own? How much is not a rubber stamp of what I have read and heard and lived? Sure, I make a sort of synthesis of what I come across, but that is all that differentiates me from another person? - - - That I have banged into and assimilated various things? That my environment and a chance combination of genes got me where I am?”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Carlos, your mysophobia does affect my health. I feel freer – more alive, more vivacious and, ironically enough, healthier – if I’m not constantly made to worry about germs and unhealthy choices. Whether it’s for a moment of spontaneous kissing in a phone booth or eating an occasional hamburger…Obsessing about your health doesn’t actually make you healthier. The fact of the matter is, Carlos, our bodies are decaying at every moment, regardless of what we do. Living is bad for your health.”

“It doesn’t have to be.”

“Maybe if you live in an antiseptic bubble specially designed by the CDC it doesn’t. But in a place like New York City, you’re fighting a pointless battle. You can either embrace the dirt and the germs as part of the risky joy of living in an exciting, overpopulated metropolis, or you can spend lots of mental real estate obsessing over whether you touched a few extra microbes when you got on the subway.”
― Zack Love, Sex in the Title: A Comedy about Dating, Sex, and Romance in NYC

“Blount”
― Founding Fathers, The United States Constitution