Strophicus

“There is a mystery in this, a minor apocalypse somewhere between what these two men once knew of themselves- a holding on to something that, in turn, refused to let them go- and I long to know it, like the old prophets.”
― Garrard Conley, Boy Erased: A Memoir of Identity, Faith, and Family

“female

i hope the future really is you
not soft, but softer,
alternative mainstreamed left sided divinely
feminine.
a woman is a man with a whoa.
exponentially deeper internal seas,
wish i had a submarine
to explore your ocean floors.
smarter because she has to be
vulnerable empathy with force,
taught remorseful but she has nothing to
apologize for, she deserves the sorriest.
everything comes first from you
every single one born from them
by me she is love, loved, loving
in the origin of power,
you are who i try to be,
feminist.
you
wondered woman,
wonderful you.”
― Nico Tortorella, All of It Is You.

“Nobody can stay in the garden of Eden," Jacques said. And then: "I wonder why."
...
Everyone, after all, goes the same dark road--and the road has a trick of being most dark, most treacherous, when it seems most bright--and it's true that nobody stays in the garden of Eden.
... Perhaps everybody has a garden of Eden, I don't know; but they have scarcely seen their garden before they see the flaming sword. Then, perhaps, life only offers the choice of remembering the garden or forgetting it. Either, or: it takes strength to remember, it takes another type of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both. People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of the pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“You don’t have to choose between being scientific and being compassionate.”
― Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst