Emily

“Hair spills

through my dreams, sprouts

from my stomach, thickens my heart,

and tangles the brain. Hair ties the tongue dumb.

Hair ascends the tree.

of my childhood -- the willow

I climbed

one bare foot and hand at a time,

feeling the knuckles of the gnarled tree, hearing

my father plead from his window, Don't fall!

”
― Li-Young Lee, Rose

“It is so hard to be a girl and want what you have never had. To be a child and want what you cannot imagine. To look at women and think, Nobody else, nobody else has ever wanted to do what I want to do. Hard to be innocent, believing yourself evil. Hard to think no one else in the history of the world wants to do this. Hard to find out that they do, but not with you. Or not in quite the way you want them to do it.”
― Dorothy Allison, Two or Three Things I Know for Sure

“She blushed. I love it when women blush, especially those big butch girls who know you want them. And I wanted her. I did. I wanted her. But she was a difficult woman, wouldn’t let me give her a backrub, read her palm, or sew up the tear in her jeans—all those ritual techniques Southern femmes have employed in the seduction of innocent butch girls.”
― Dorothy Allison, Two or Three Things I Know for Sure

“I don't know if hope is white. But I do know that hope for me is like some mythical creature.”
― Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian