Jesse Ross

“I barely knew I had skin before I met you.”
― Sarah Waters, The Paying Guests

“Here I am, a bundle of past recollections and future dreams, knotted up in a reasonably attractive bundle of flesh. I remember what this flesh had gone through; I dream of what it may go through. I record here the actions of optical nerves, of taste buds, of sensory perception. And, I think: I am but one more drop in the great sea of matter, defined, with the ability to realize my existence.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“... all life rests on appearance, art, illusion, optics, the need for perspective and for error...”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy

“In the neuter austerity of that terrain all phenomena were bequeathed a strange equality and no one thing nor spider nor stone nor blade of grass could put forth claim to precedence. The very clarity of these articles belied their familiarity, for the eye predicates the whole on some feature or part and here was nothing more luminous than another and nothing more enshadowed and in the optical democracy of such landscapes all preference is made whimsical and a man and a rock become endowed with unguessed kinship.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West