Vanessa

“Rather than being 'this not that' I am this *and* that... I've felt like a blossoming flower. As I become more fully me and as I'm more comfortable with each petal of my identity, I open myself up and look into the sun... As someone who identifies as bisexual and does see the world on a multitude of plains, my intellect and creativity, my head and my heart, are just further parallels of how I am able to find myself attracted to and love both men and women.

[Participant quote from the study 'The positive aspects of a bisexual self-identification' in Psychology and Sexuality 1 (2) by S. Scales Rostosky, D. E. Riggle, and D. Pascale-Hague pp.131-44]”
― Julia Shaw, Bi: The Hidden Culture, History, and Science of Bisexuality

“I wonder why I don't go to bed and go to sleep. But then it would be tomorrow, so I decide that no matter how tired, no matter how incoherent I am, I can skip on hour more of sleep and live.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Where there was nature and earth, life and water, I saw a desert landscape that was unending, resembling some sort of crater, so devoid of reason and light and spirit that the mind could not grasp it on any sort of conscious level and if you came close the mind would reel backward, unable to take it in. It was a vision so clear and real and vital to me that in its purity it was almost abstract. This was what I could understand, this was how I lived my life, what I constructed my movement around, how I dealt with the tangible. This was the geography around which my reality revolved: it did not occur to me, ever, that people were good or that a man was capable of change or that the world could be a better place through one’s own taking pleasure in a feeling or a look or a gesture, of receiving another person’s love or kindness. Nothing was affirmative, the term “generosity of spirit” applied to nothing, was a cliche, was some kind of bad joke. Sex is mathematics. Individuality no longer an issue. What does intelligence signify? Define reason. Desire- meaningless. Intellect is not a cure. Justice is dead. Fear, recrimination, innocence, sympathy, guilt, waste, failure, grief, were things, emotions, that no one really felt anymore. Reflection is useless, the world is senseless. Evil is its only permanence. God is not alive. Love cannot be trusted. Surface, surface, surface, was all that anyone found meaning in…this was civilization as I saw it, colossal and jagged…”
― Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

“I could recognize him by touch alone, by smell; I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. I would know him in death, at the end of the world.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles