Longing

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  And then my work expanded in my twenties. It wasn’t just about family violence. This is about structural violence too and about how I relate to myself through desire when I am deeply undesirable, I am expendable, and I am only here for labor or reproduction? And … then what is my erotic self in that, when you’re devoid of being able to define yourself outside of capitalism and white supremacy? So she touches on all of these things, right? I mean this is a fucking mantra. Because it says, first, how can I be a creator? How can I trust that I am worthy of defining desire and pleasure and liberation as myself or in relationship to other Black lesbians, Black queer women of color, trans and gender-nonconforming folks of color? That reality seemed untouchable when I was coming into my own, until she spoke these words. My truth. In my late teens, I found the Audre Lordes and the James Baldwins and the Toni Cade Bambaras and the Essex Hemphills and the Marlon Riggses, the Pat Parkers, the Cherríe Moragas, Gloria Anzaldúas, Jewelle Gomezes, and more. All these, they were more than people. They were saints in my reality. Black lesbian leaders like Fran White were my teachers, literally my teachers, who I had the opportunity to learn from, to see them embody power and transformation as my teachers in college. And I was amazingly anointed by the breadth of a canon of Black lesbian feminism that I came into, one that is very much defined by pleasure and power in relationship to our lived experience. And of course, Barbara Smith lives and breathes this too. amb. That’s the lineage! It feels kind of like you had been this stream making your way through the boulders and down the mountain, to this very fast-moving river. I can feel that rolling along into this … Black and Brown brilliance. Decolonizing. Deconstructing. Cara. And it felt like they were constellations. We were constellations. I’ve written several pieces using that analogy of maps and constellations and being cartographers. Harriet Tubman as an architect and a cartographer. Audre Lorde as an architect and a cartographer. And what’s that called—when you read the stars? … an astrologer. Yes, astrologers for life. So I don’t know if that answers your question. I want to say also: when I did performance theater, political theater in the nineties, there wasn’t a lot out there. You had, of course, Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls.37 That changed my fucking life. That changed all little Black girls’ lives. Right? Then I met her and realized, oh, you could talk like that too. You could talk like poetry. Who cares if anyone doesn’t understand you. Roll with it. I was like, go ’head with your bad self. And I found my place of power and righteousness in language.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  She had awakened particular appetites in me; and where else, I thought, but with Diana, in the company of Sapphists - where else would those queer hungers be assuaged? I have spoken of the peculiarly timeless quality of my new life, of my removal from the ordinary workings of the hours, the days and the weeks. Diana and I often made love until dawn, and ate breakfast at nightfall; or else, we woke at the regular time, but stayed abed with the drapes close-drawn, and took our lunch by candle-light. Once we rang for Blake, and she came in her night-gown: it was half-past three, we had woken her from her bed. Another time I was roused by bird-song: I squinted at the lines of light around the shutters, and realised I had not seen the sun for a week. In a house kept uniformly warm by the labour of servants, and with a carriage to collect us and deposit us where we wished, even the seasons lost their meanings or gained new ones. I knew winter had arrived only when Diana’s walking-dresses changed from silk to corduroy, her cloaks from grenadine to sable; and when my own closet rail sagged with astrakhan, and camel’s-hair, and tweed. But there was one anniversary from the old order of things that, even in the enchanted atmosphere of Felicity Place, surrounded by so much narcotic luxury, I could not quite forget. One day, when I had been Diana’s lover for a little less than a year, I was woken by the rustle of news-sheet. My mistress was beside me with the morning paper, and I opened my eyes upon a headline. Home Rule Bill, it said; Irish to Demonstrate June 3rd. I gave a cry. It was not the words which arrested me - they meant nothing to me. The date, however, was as familiar as my own name. June the third was my birthday; in a week I should be twenty-three. ‘Twenty-three!’ said Diana when I told her, in a kind of delight. ‘What a really glorious age that is! With your youth still hot upon you, like a lover in a pant; and time with his face around the curtain, peeping on.’ She could talk like this, even first thing in the morning; I only yawned. But then she said that we must celebrate - and at that, I looked livelier. ‘What shall we do,’ she said, ‘that we haven’t done before? Where shall I take you ... ?’ Where she hit upon, in the end, was the Opera.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I took a step away - but then, very quickly, I returned to the counter and put my hand upon his arm. I said: ‘What’s Kitty’s place, on the bill at the Mo?’ ‘Her place?’ He thought about it, folding another cloak. ‘I’m not sure. Second half, near the start, half-past nine or so ...’ Then Maria’s voice came calling: ‘Is there trouble, Neville, over the tip?’ I knew then that if I lingered near him any longer some terrible sort of scene would ensue. I didn’t look at him again but went back to Diana at once, and said it was nothing, I was sorry. But when she raised a hand to smooth back the hair I had unsettled, I flinched, feeling Bill’s eyes upon me; and when she pulled my arm through hers, and Maria stepped around me to take my other arm, the flesh upon my back seemed to give a kind of shudder, as if there was a pistol pointed at it. The hall itself, which was so grand and glorious, I only gazed at rather dully. We did not have a box - there had not been time to book a box - but our seats were very good ones, in the centre of one of the front rows of the stalls. I had made us late, however, and the stalls were almost full: we had to stumble over twenty pairs of legs to reach our seats. Dickie spilled her wine. Satin snapped at a lady with a fox-fur around her throat. Diana, when she sat at last, was thin-lipped and self-conscious: this was not the kind of entrance she had planned for us, at all. And I sat, numb to her, numb to all of it. I could think only of Kitty. That she was still in the halls, in her act with Walter. That Bill saw her daily - would see her later, after the show, when he fetched Flora. That even now, while the actors in the opera we had come to see were putting on their grease-paint, she was sitting in a dressing-room three streets away, putting on hers. As I thought all this, the conductor appeared, and was clapped; the lights went down, and the crowd grew silent. When the music started and the curtain went up at last, I gazed at the stage in a kind of stupor. And when the singing began, I flinched. The opera was Figaro’s Wedding. I can remember hardly any of it.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  "Come to my help," said he to his hearers,1977 "for I am almost torn asunder by my inward longing and by the Spirit. The longing urges me to flight, to solitude in the mountains, to quietude of soul and body, to withdrawal of spirit from all sensuous things, and to retirement into myself, that I may commune undisturbed with God, and be wholly penetrated by the rays of His Spirit .... But the other, the Spirit, would lead me into the midst of life, to serve the common weal, and by furthering others to further myself, to spread light, and to present to God a people for His possession, a holy people, a royal priesthood (Tit. ii. 14; 1 Pet. ii. 9), and His image again purified in many. For as a whole garden is more than a plant, and the whole heaven with all its beauties is more glorious than a star, and the whole body more excellent than one member, so also before God the whole well-instructed church is better than one well-ordered person, and a man must in general look not only on his own things, but also on the things of others. So Christ did, who, though He might have remained in His own dignity and divine glory, not only humbled Himself to the form of a servant, but also, despising all shame, endured the death of the cross, that by His suffering He might blot out sin, and by His death destroy death." Thus he stood a faithful helper by the side of his venerable and universally beloved father, who reached the age of almost an hundred years, and had exercised the priestly office for forty-five; and on the death of his father, in 374, he delivered a masterly funeral oration, which Basil attended.1978 "There is," said he in this discourse, turning to his still living mother, "only one life, to behold the (divine) life; there is only one death—sin; for this is the corruption of the soul. But all else, for the sake of which many exert themselves, is a dream which decoys us from the true; it is a treacherous phantom of the soul. When we think so, O my mother, then we shall not boast of life, nor dread death. For whatsoever evil we yet endure, if we press out of it to true life, if we, delivered from every change, from every vortex, from all satiety, from all vassalage to evil, shall there be with eternal, no longer changeable things, as small lights circling around the great." A short time after he had been invested with the vacant bishopric, he retired again, in 375, to his beloved solitude, and this time be went to Seleucia in Isauria, to the vicinity of a church dedicated to St. Thecla.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  In January there was Ralph’s birthday to celebrate. It fell, in the most uncanny fashion, on the same day as Diana’s; and as I smiled to see him opening his gifts, I remembered the bust of Antinous, and wondered if it was still casting its frigid glances over the warm transactions at Felicity Place, and whether Diana ever looked at it and remembered me. But by now I had grown so at home in Bethnal Green that I could barely believe I had ever lived anywhere else, or imagine a time when Quilter Street routines were not my own. I had become used to the neighbours’ racket, and to the clamour of the street. I bathed once a week, like Florence and Ralph, and the rest of the time was content to wash in a bowl: Diana’s bathroom had become a strange and distant memory to me - as of paradise, after the fall. I kept my hair short. I wore my trousers, as I had planned, to do the housework in - at least, for a month or so I did: after that, the neighbours had all caught glimpses of me in them, and since I had become known in the district as something of a trouser-wearer, it seemed rather a fuss to take the trousers off at night and put a frock on. No one appeared to mind it; in some houses in Bethnal Green, after all, it was a luxury to have any sort of clothes at all, and you regularly saw women in their husbands’ jackets, and sometimes a man in a shawl. Mrs Monks’ daughters, next door, would run squealing when they saw me. Ralph’s union colleagues tended to look me over, as they debated, and then lose the thread of their text. Ralph himself, however, would sometimes wander downstairs with a shirt or a flannel waistcoat in his hand, saying vaguely: ‘I found this, Nance, in the bottom of my cupboard, and wondered, would the thing be any use to you... ?’ As for Florence - well, increasingly I seemed to catch her gazing at me as she had gazed at me that day through the glass of the window; but always — always — she would look away again, and her eyes would grow dark. I longed to keep them fixed upon me, but didn’t know how. I had made myself saucy, for Diana’s sake; I had flirted heartlessly with Zena; but with Florence I might as well have been eighteen again, sweating and anxious - afraid, of trespassing upon her fading sorrow. If only, I would think, we were mary-annes. If only I were a renter again, and she some nervous Soho gent, and I could simply lead her to some shabby shady place and there unbutton her...

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Ben kneels and says this is where the 口 begins, where the soil is soft as snot and darker than the night around us. We need to dig them out, Ben says, sharpening her wrists against each other. She places my hand on the ground and I almost feel a pulse, a place to part the soil. We work our hands into the seam-lipped 口, squatting the way we once did when we dug shitholes in her father’s lot, imagining that if we dug deep enough we’d hit water and our shits would float up as islands we’d founded together. Our hands struggle into the soil, grabbing and emptying, adding to the mound at our backs that will soon outgrow us. It’s Ben who meets metal first, three feet below: the silver scalp of a cage-top. It’s her birdcage, the one we fed to the 口, the one she claimed not to mourn. But her hands accelerate, and I know she wants it home in her hands again, rust coating her palms like sugar. We work downward with our fingers, revealing the spine of each bar, the locked door. It’s dented but undigested, with only a few bars missing. We stand now, grinding our heels into the soil to uproot the cage. Ben is panting out a pearled fog. I’m dressed in my sweat. I hunt for my own hands in the dark, find them grasped around hers. When we lift it together, the cage disrobes its dirt. It’s full of birds. The perch in the center is crowded with some winged species, each body no bigger than a thumb, feathers moving fluent as tongues. They’re the color of the dark, a dark only our mouths can make. Ben sets down the cage and we kneel in front of it. She sockets the key into the lock and hooks the door open with her pinky. When the birds flock out, they multiply in the dark, mating with the night to become many. They fly toward the trees, branches parting like legs to let them in. They land on the roof of the shack and along the fence redheaded with rust. The birds call to one another in our voices. Ben and I agree that in the spring, we’ll cut off our hair and scatter it here so the birds can collect the strands in their beaks and build their nests out of us. We’ll let them breed in the black of our hair. Pursing its lips, our hole spits a flock of black sparrows. They flee the 口’s throat, threading in and out of clouds, sewing the dark whole.

• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  When Bill or the boxer perform cunnilingus on me, I often just lie back with eyes closed and imagine all sorts of oral situations. They are often lesbian in nature, and mostly are concerned with a beautiful girlfriend with whom I made love many times between the ages of fifteen and seventeen. Unfortunately, our family was transferred, breaking up our relationship. I had sex with other girls, but none were as lovely or skillful as my first friend. I have told Bill that if our paths should ever cross, I would go to bed with her, if she were willing, and I am sure she would be. I began fantasizing at a very early age; at eight, I believe. At that time, my uncle, then about fourteen, showed me his erect penis, and showed me where it was supposed to go. He gave me a demonstration with his finger, which I enjoyed very much, and rubbed the head of his penis against my small hole. We engaged in similar sex play many times, and I began to masturbate regularly. Always, it was accompanied by thoughts of his finger screwing me, or his penis caressing my inner lips and clitoris. When I was thirteen, I began having sex with my brother, and this continued irregularly until about my sixteenth year. I enjoy imagining that I am on exhibition. I have performed for Bill so often that I am accustomed to an audience, albeit of one. In our travels we have had several opportunities to view sex exhibitions, and strangely, perhaps, I always identify with the girls, and how, and to what extent, I felt that I could improve upon their performance. I am sure that I have a decided streak of exhibitionism in me. I love to pose for pictures; the sexier the better. In mild ways (with Bill’s approval), I have indulged in exhibitionism. For instance, I have not worn panties in many years, except (honest injun) when I am expected to take them off; at the doctor’s or the dressmaker’s. I have given lots of strange men an unexpected peek at my pussy, while Bill and I observed their surprised and pleased reactions. Usually, this occurs on a motor trip, and I will have applied lipstick to my labia, to be sure they are unmistakably visible against the background of dark brown hair. Being rather moist and swollen, their visibility is enhanced. On trips, we always have a dildo handy and, of course, the boxer. I have let him screw me many times as we traveled, much, I am sure, to the surprise of passing truck drivers, who must have wondered what a large dog was doing with his paws on the back of the front seat.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  But I only answered that there hadn’t been any blonde people on the island. Jie packed everything, which meant she wasn’t coming back from the honeymoon, and that night we slept facing each other like we used to, the dark a third body between us, our daughter. From the window came the moon, a buoy we both held on to. I could smell the horse-oil in her hair, the boy on her breath: Her husband was picking her up in the morning, and then they would be in Nevada, the state we had crossed to get here, where the sun looked like a half-peeled orange and the dry air knifed out your lungs. While she slept that night, I stole something from her suitcase, which was just the same twined-up shepi bag she’d brought from the island. I took the book. I told myself it wasn’t stealing if the thing had already been stolen once. Two acts of thievery canceled out, became something more like salvaging. I still have it, that book. You should read it to me sometime, skipping all the words you think I don’t know. I won’t know them, but I’ll pretend to, shame you for thinking me stupid, and then you’ll be so sorry you’ll read the whole book to me all over again, redacting nothing. Maybe you can tell me what those two girls are doing in that field, what they’re watching for. If they’re waiting for something to arrive or to leave. Don’t tell me how it ends yet. Tell me that it doesn’t. The cover keeps changing every time I look at it, and now the field is frazzled with animals, mountain dogs and mice and a tiger tilling the field with its tail. Under the sofa, in that dark rind of space where the mice shit and breed and eat their babies, I slide out the book I stole from her, consider feeding it page by page to your holes, erasing those two girls from the field that’s waiting to be sown with their bones. But always, I keep it, something I know she misses, an absence like a field, growing until it surrounds you. Something I know she’ll return for. DAUGHTER Rabbit moon (II) When my brother propped his penis in his palm and peed out the door, wetting a mile of highway with rain, my mother said he must have the bladder of a horse. I asked how she knew about the anatomies of horses and she said she knew what it is to be ridden . We rode up the highway to a city of factories: concrete buildings converted into showrooms, the upper windows blacked out, headless mannequins haunting the sidewalks. We circled twice around Ama’s block. Hers was a house sitting on its haunches, afraid to stand all the way up.

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  She drove me clear to Colorado Springs, to what the Green Stamp marketing wizards had named the Redemption Center. The Indian woman behind the counter wore a polished turquoise stone on a fine silver chain inside the deep shadow of her serious cleavage. That cleavage stays with me because I stood eye-level with it a long time. Finding something I’d X’ed in the catalogue actually on the shelves turned out to be a problem. There was no new rod and reel looking just like a Zippo. There were no gold cufflinks shaped like horseshoes with diamond chips for nailheads. The lady offered to send to Ohio, which would take six to eight weeks. But my daddy didn’t raise me a fool. Just as I knew not to buy on credit, I damn sure knew not to pay for something I couldn’t lay my hands on, not unless it was from Sears. The lady was nice about looking through her inventory book, though. We spent the better part of her shift at it. I’d read off the product number from my dog-eared catalogue, and she’d check for it in her three-ring binder. The notebook was tethered to the counter with twisted cable, and had a dusty blue cloth cover like the ones high school kids carried. As time wore on, the inventory book came to hold all the power of a sorcerer’s spell book. It had Daddy’s gift somewhere inside it, and locating that gift on its onionskin pages was the last leg of a long journey that had started back when I’d chased after Daddy down the mountain. Whenever the lady stopped flipping past the staggered dividers and started running her fingernail down a single page, I’d cross the fingers on both hands for luck. All this time Mother stood chain-smoking back by the glass door. I could hear her stamp out each cigarette butt. The toe on her high heel wiggled and made a raspy noise against the concrete floor. No sooner had one been stamped out than another got lit. I’d hear that lighter flip open, then the rough click of the flint sending out a spark. A few seconds later a double lungful of Salem exhaust would drift up to us. She also sighed out heavy smoke every time the clerk shook her head no. Not a single thing I’d picked was in stock. That shocked me. I’d lain in bed night after night picturing Daddy stepping down from his truck after the long drive to Colorado, how he’d scoop me up in his arms while Lecia stood tapping her foot. Behind him on the truck seat would sit the box in which the new fishing reel (or tie tack, or ebony domino set) had been shipped. Luring Daddy back had—in my mind—edged over the line from being a wish into being a fact. I even fooled myself that not having everything in stock augured well.

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  He’d arranged the time with Mother in advance. As we walked up, I could make out through the screen and the extra layer of chicken-wire mesh stapled to the window—to keep folks from running off, I guess—the wild tropical print of her lounging robe. Daddy had to hoist me up by my waist to reach that window. Even then, only my nose fit over the bottom sill. Mother put her hand on the chicken wire. It was very white, and I put my hand to match up with it, careful that I touched as much of hers as I could. The screen gave a little to let our palms actually meet through the chicken wire. Her face in the deep shadow of the room was just a pale oval without any features, but I could hear the crying in her voice when she said she missed us. She dabbed at that oval with a Kleenex and made snotty noises in her head. We took some more turns saying we missed each other. Then I said something that caused Lecia to pinch my ankle: “I’m sorry you’re all locked up,” I said, which made her laugh. “Shit, honey,” she said, “you-all are locked up, too. You’re just in a bigger room.” No sooner had she said that than from a far corner of the room, where I hadn’t looked at all, there came a whole flock of giggly laughs that chilled me to the core. Peering over toward those laughs, I could see a vague knot of lady patients in blue nightgowns sitting at a large round table in a low gray cloud of cigarette smoke. It struck me that those were the other crazy people. But instead of being scared by their facelessness, I just felt disgruntled that they got to hang out with my mother all day. They ate meals with her and played gin rummy with her while I only got fetched up to the window like I was a big load of something she could hardly bear to see. My seeing them seemed to prompt Daddy to lower me back down from the window. I said, “I love you,” and snubbed a little. Mother did the same, then gradually she slid out of my sight. Lecia was taller, and so Daddy was able to heft her up higher. He locked all his fingers together into a kind of stirrup, then straightened his back so she rose to fill the whole window. It rankled me to see Lecia and Mother talking all whispery. I’d had to poke my nose over the window ledge like some kind of bandit or peeping Tom. Lecia had her whole face up next to Mother’s. Plus I couldn’t hear a word they said. Secrets had always moved between them. Nights, when Lecia was mixing her martinis or changing record albums for her, Mother usually fell silent when I came into earshot.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The Church of God was his home, and that Church knows no boundaries of nationality and language. The world was his parish. Having left the papacy, he still remained a Catholic in the best sense of that word, and prayed and labored for the unity of all believers. Like his friend Melanchthon, he deeply deplored the divisions of Protestantism. To heal them he was willing to cross ten oceans. Thus he wrote, in reply to Archbishop Cranmer, who had invited him (March 20, 1552), with Melanchthon and Bullinger, to a meeting in Lambeth Palace for the purpose of drawing up a consensus creed for the Reformed Churches.1222 After expressing his zeal for the Church universal, he continues (Oct. 14, 1552):— "I wish, indeed, it could be brought about that men of learning and authority from the different churches should meet somewhere, and after thoroughly discussing the different articles of faith, should, by a unanimous decision, deliver down to posterity some certain rule of doctrine. But amongst the chief evils of the age must be reckoned the marked division between the different churches, insomuch that human society can hardly be said to be established among us, much less a holy communion of the members of Christ, which, though all profess it, few indeed really observe with sincerity. But if the clergy are more lukewarm than they should be, the fault lies chiefly with their sovereigns, who are either so involved in their secular affairs, as to neglect altogether the welfare of the Church, and indeed religion itself, or so well content to see their own countries at peace as to care little about others; and thus the members being divided, the body of the Church lies lacerated. "As to myself, if I should be thought of any use, I would not, if need be, object to cross ten seas for such a purpose. If the assisting of England were alone concerned, that would be motive enough with me. Much more, therefore, am I of opinion, that I ought to grudge no labor or trouble, seeing that the object in view is an agreement among the learned, to be drawn up by the weight of their authority according to Scripture, in order to unite Churches seated far apart. But my insignificance makes me hope that I may be spared. I shall have discharged my part by offering up my prayers for what may have been done by others. Melanchthon is so far off that it takes some time to exchange letters. Bullinger has, perhaps, already answered you. I only wish that I had the power, as I have the inclination, to serve the cause."1223

• From The Art of Memoir

  redolent of chemical coolant—would slosh out onto my bare feet. Getting doused by that splash of freezing condensation was like a physical baptism miraculously dousing me in that single, living instant. It’s as if memory’s eye suddenly flipped open. Like many such scenes, it comes to me in florid present tense. I look down and see the giant bamboo-bottom flip-flops I’d bought in California, with their black velvet straps, getting drenched with cold water. And I am in that car again. I can see the derby hat Mother wore—a pimp hat, she called it. She’d bought me one, too, in Houston. And she wears a copper bracelet that turns her wrist green because somebody told her it helps with arthritis in her hand. And another sense memory comes: I smell peaches, which we bought by the bushel in Arkansas. Also vodka from the screwdrivers Mother drank all the way down. I rest inside those sense memories, and a phrase comes to me— peaches galore. Mother says we have peaches galore, and I say, Wasn’t that some burlesque dancer’s name? And Mother says, That was Pussy Galore. Her saying the word pussy is almost as wince- inducing as watching the savagery with which she devours a peach. And I remember feeling cooped up with her—a luxury in some ways, since her attention was hard to come by. But I also recall longing to run away. Those conflicting desires held the emotional fuel in that chapter. And the memories start flying at me like bats swooping out of the past—my reading aloud to her an early English version of One Hundred Years of Solitude. That novel makes it in, and the phrase about Pussy Galore; the derby hats do a cameo. But the copper bracelet and the air conditioner vanish. And that beautiful Iowa corn, the sheer order and wealth of it—those rich farms with large white houses—that’s the kind of American scene I longed to enter. It opposes my squalid hometown and Mother’s own Dust Bowl childhood. The cornfield is an apt symbol for what I aspired to, at the time. Folks from normal childhoods might fear the tidy repetition of the rows. To me, they looked like an order that lent comfort. So I used the image to begin the chapter.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  "Alas! it was but too true, the last drops of that shattering fluid were still oozing from me. My mother was standing by my bedside, in flesh and blood. Mine, then, had not been a dream! "But, where was my sister, or the girl I had enjoyed? Moreover, was this stiff rod I was holding in my hand, mine or Teleny's? "Surely I was alone and in my bed. Then what did my mother want with me? And how did that loathsome poodle, standing there on its hind legs leering at me, get into my room? "I finally came to my senses, and saw that the poodle was only my shirt, which I had thrown on a chair, before going to bed. Being now thoroughly awake, my mother made me understand that hearing me groan and shriek, she had come in to see if I were unwell. Of course I hastened to assure her that I was in perfect health, and had only been the prey of a frightful nightmare. She thereupon put her fresh hand upon my hot forehead. The soothing touch of her soft hand cooled the fire burning within my brain, and allayed the fever raging in my blood. "When I was quietened, she made me drink a bumper of sugared water flavoured with essence of orange-flowers, and then left me. I once more dropped off to sleep. I awoke, however, several times, and always to see the pianist before me. "On the morrow likewise, when I came to myself, his name was ringing in my ears, my lips were muttering it, and my first thoughts reverted to him. I saw him—in my mind's eye—standing there on the stage, bowing before the public, his burning glances rivetted on mine. "I lay for some time in my bed, drowsily contemplating that sweet vision, so vague and indefinite, trying to recall his features which had got mixed up with those of the several statues of Antinöus which I had seen. "Analyzing my feelings, I was now conscious that a new sensation had come over me—a vague feeling of uneasiness and unrest. There was an emptiness in me, still I could not understand if the void was in my heart or in my head. I had lost nothing and yet I felt lonely, forlorn, nay almost bereaved. I tried to fathom my morbid state, and all I could find out was that my feelings were akin to those of being home-sick or mother-sick, with this simple difference, that the exile knows what his cravings are, but I did not. It was something indefinite like the Sehnsucht of which the Germans speak so much, and which they really feel so little.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  "When was it that you met Teleny again?" "Not for some time afterwards. The fact is that although I continued to feel irresistibly attracted towards him, drawn as it were by an impelling power the strength of which I could at times hardly withstand, still I continued to avoid him. "Whenever he played in public I always went to hear him—or rather, to look at him; and I only lived during those short moments when he was on the stage. My glasses would then be rivetted upon him; my eyes gloated upon his heavenly figure, so full of youth, life, and manhood. "The longing that I felt to press my mouth on his beautiful mouth and parted lips was so intense that it always made my penis water. "At times the space between us seemed to lessen and dwindle in such a way that I felt as though I could breathe his warm and scented breath—nay, I actually seemed to feel the contact of his body against my own. "The sensation produced by the mere thought that his skin was touching mine excited my nervous system in such a way that the intensity of this barren pleasure produced at first a pleasant numbness over my whole body, which being prolonged, soon turned into a dull pain. "He himself always appeared to feel my presence in the theatre, for his eyes invariably looked for me until they pierced the densest crowd to find me out. I knew, however, that he could not really see me in the corner where I was ensconced, either in the pit, the gallery, or at the bottom of some box. Still, go whithersoever I would, his glances were always directed towards me. Ah, those eyes! as unfathomable as the dim water of a well. Even now, as I remember them after these many years, my heart beats, and I feel my head grow giddy thinking of them. If you had seen those eyes, you would know what that burning languor which poets are always writing about really is. "Of one thing I was justly proud. Since that famous evening of the charity concert, he played—if not in a more theoretically correct way—far more brilliantly and more sensationally than he had ever done before. "His whole heart now poured itself out in those voluptuous Hungarian melodies, and all those whose blood was not frozen with envy and age were entranced by that music. "His name, therefore, began to atract large audiences, and although musical critics were divided in their opinions, the papers always had long articles about him." "And—being so much in love with him—you had the fortitude to suffer, and yet to resist the temptation of seeing him." "I was young and inexperienced, therefore moral; for what is morality but prejudice?" "Prejudice?"

• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  Even today, I close my eyes and wish for all the world that Paula had an enormous, bevel-pointed organ stirring within me. As yet, I haven’t confided to Paula that I fantasize that her elongated clitoris is Anjou’s animal maleness, since I feel she might be disturbed, thinking I would prefer an animal to herself, which is quite absurd. And yet the association persists, and I like it. [Letter] LisaAlthough I am married, most of my fantasies are about lesbians, and I continue to have occasional lesbian experiences. When my lesbian friend is making love to me, masturbating me, I climax to the thought of her having intercourse with me using a dildo. I suppose I began having fantasies about the age of sixteen. Then, my fantasies were of going to bed with a man, having intercourse, but not having a climax. Now, when I am with my husband, my fantasies are often of animals. I imagine that he and I are lying on the bed, when a dog comes into the room and begins to lick me. I then masturbate the dog, get onto my knees, and the dog mounts me. I like to imagine that the dog ejaculates into me. I imagine that my husband mounts the dog as it mounts me. My other fantasy is of a donkey. I imagine that my husband has sold me to an Arab, and that I am in the desert. My slave master brings his friend to watch me, their new entertainment. I am told I must entertain the animal, the donkey. I follow this through from beginning to end: the animal is led in and I masturbate and suck it. When the donkey is excited, it mounts me from behind. I like to take all of its tool and it ejaculates into me. But my fantasies with my lesbian friend are the most exciting; it is then that the man’s tool, her dildo, becomes real and totally satisfies me. [Letter] ZiziMy name is Zizi. I am French and militant in the “Mouvement de Libération de la Femme” [Women’s Lib]. As far as my establishment in time is concerned, I’m twenty-three years old. I think that female sexuality is too hidden by taboos and inhibitions, that is why I don’t hesitate to express some of my so-called fantasies. (In spite of my poor English, your curiosity of searching in that area excites me, I must admit.)

• From Going Clear (2013)

  In that respect, science fiction and theology have much in common. Some of the most closely guarded secrets of Scientology were originally published in other guises in Hubbard’s science fiction. Certainly, the same mind that roamed so freely through imaginary universes might be inclined to look at the everyday world and suspect that there was something more behind the surface reality. The broad canvas of science fiction allowed Hubbard to think in large-scale terms about the human condition. He was bold. He was fanciful. He could easily invent an elaborate, plausible universe. But it is one thing to make that universe believable, and another to believe it. That is the difference between art and religion. HUBBARD NOW LIVED two lives: one on the farm in Port Orchard, surrounded by his parents and Polly and the kids; the other in New York, where he rented an apartment on the Upper West Side. The city rewarded him with the recognition he craved. He enjoyed frequent lunches at the Knickerbocker Hotel with his colleagues in the American Fiction Guild, where he could swap tales and schmooze with editors. He also became a member of the prestigious Explorers Club, which added credibility to his frequently told stories of adventure. “ In his late twenties, Hubbard was a tall, well-built man with bright red hair, a pale complexion, and a long-nosed face that gave him the look of a reincarnated Pan,” a fellow science-fiction writer, L. Sprague de Camp, later recalled. “He arranged in his New York apartment a curtained inclosure the size of a telephone booth, lit by a blue light bulb, in which he could work fast without distraction.” The fact that Hubbard was a continent away from his wife offered him the opportunity to court other women, which he did so openly that he became an object of wonder among his writer colleagues. Ron blamed Polly for his philandering. “ Because of her coldness physically, the falsity of her pretensions, I believed myself a near eunuch,” he wrote in a private memoir (which the church disputes) some years later. “When I found I was attractive to other women, I had many affairs. But my failure to please Polly made me always pay so much attention to my momentary mate that I derived small pleasure myself. This was an anxiety neurosis which cut down my natural powers.” One of those momentary mates was named Helen. “ I loved her and she me,” Hubbard recorded. “The affair would have lasted had not Polly found out.” Polly had discovered two letters to different women that Hubbard left in the mailbox when he was back in Port Orchard; she took the letters, read them, then vengefully switched the envelopes, and put them back in the mail. For a while, Ron and Polly didn’t speak. They were apparently reconciled in 1940, when the two of them cruised to Alaska on their thirty-foot ketch, the Magician , which they called Maggie .

• From My People (2022)

  Her best friend then is still coming and has a daughter, fourteen, who is Mrs. Nash’s oldest daughter’s best friend. They both spend a lot of time horseback riding. At a get-together at her rented house one night—she and her husband, Robert, an architect, are building here—Mrs. Nash’s cousin and his wife, Mr. and Mrs. Harold Johnson, told how they had fallen in love with the Vineyard. Now that they are retiring, they plan to maintain here all year round. Mr. Johnson drives a taxi, dabbles in other businesses, and serves as president of the local Alcoholics Anonymous and also of the Martha’s Vineyard NAACP, which has about seventy-five members, mostly white. “We don’t have any real issues here,” he said. “Mostly we raise scholarship money for the local children.” During the winter, he said, there are about thirty-five to forty black families here. Most of them, he said, are elderly and include the Portuguese as well. Still, in addition to the Chop area, there are other places on the island where blacks do not own property. The town circle, for instance, at one time had a restrictive covenant prohibiting anyone from owning property there other than members of the Town Meeting, a fundamentalist religious group. No one seems to know what has happened to the covenant, but it is apparent that the tradition has not been broken. Bruce Lewellyn, a New York businessman, who along with a Puerto Rican and Jewish partner, owns a multimillion-dollar chain of eleven supermarkets in Manhattan and the Bronx, owns a house that overlooks the Oak Bluffs beach. While his family—which includes his wife, Jackie, whom he met here, their two children, his cousin, United States Customs Court Judge James L. Watson, and his family—have come here out of tradition, he said, the houses for blacks have become available mostly as the result of the exodus of whites to the more remote parts of the island. But property values, at one time low, seem to be rising. Ten years ago, the Edleys (she acts in a soap opera now and he is an official of the Ford Foundation) joined with five other couples from Philadelphia, where they were living then, and purchased their twelve-bedroom house for $8,000. This year, after a decade in which each couple contributed $25 a month, the six couples finally paid for it. They could sell it now, they say, for twice that. But they don’t want to. One reason is that altogether they have fourteen children. One of their neighbors is Senator Edward W. Brooke, Republican of Massachusetts, whose spacious lot includes a tennis court. But despite their professional and economic attainments, the gap between them and their white counterparts vividly exists. “For thirty years we’ve [blacks and whites] been living side by side up here,” said one of the black professionals, “and there is hope—but only for a continuing peaceful coexistence.

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  He was one of those clean, featureless men who can move for decades on the periphery of a pool game buying his fair share of beers without ever uttering a full sentence. Blue had bought Lecia and me each a doll, curly-headed, near as tall as ourselves. Lecia’s was blond, mine black-headed. Under the sedan’s dome light, mine stared from its box on the wide back seat with an indifference bold enough to edge over into insult. A copper wire garroted her head in place. Her wrists and feet were likewise strapped down. Highway lights started streaking over the cellophane mask above her perfect features. She gazed out sullen. Her cold blue eyes announced that she wanted some other girl, not me. Well, I wanted my very own mother, and I’d have told her so, too, if the thought didn’t put a lump in my throat. Instead I told her—out loud, I guess—“People in hell want ice water.” Daddy said, “Say what?” And I told him I’d kill for a glass of ice water. Surely Daddy said more to me in the car. But any other words were wiped clean from my head. He sounded real country talking to Blue while we drove. “Now you take old Raymond there…” he was saying to Blue. But it came out, “Nah yew tike ol Ryemon thar…” And slow, like he was addressing a deaf man. In the house, Daddy slipped his jean jacket over a kitchen stool. We were fixing to eat, he said. Lecia unstacked the white mela-mine picnic plates on the plywood bar. They looked crude as Flintstone plates after our Colorado china. Each had three plastic compartments so you could keep your butter beans out of your greens, and the greens’ pot liquor from sogging up your cornbread. Daddy stood at the stove working with a long wooden spoon inside a pot of something muddy. He dribbled water from the silver kettle into the pot, and I heard it loosen up. In a few minutes you could smell garlic and pork back, and then came the steamy idea of sheer celery slices in a mess of red beans and rice. “This here’ll be even better tomorrow,” he said. He’d also made a wheel of cornbread in an iron skillet, the bottom-crust burnt first in hot lard on the stovetop the way I liked. Lecia cut hers off and flipped it across the butter dish at me. There was a dish of raw green onions we ate between bites. And I nearly finished the whole cereal bowl of collards, spoon after slotted spoonful. “Pokey, you know what I’d do to them greens?” Daddy said. He didn’t even wait for me to say what, just doctored them with vinegary sprinkles from a jar of yellow Tabasco peppers. He kept looking up to tell Lecia he loved her with all his heart, but mine was the plate he fussed over.

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  The turntable plays “Parigi mi cara.” The vanilla bean in the tube is reddish black and wrinkled up like the snaky root of something, or a bird’s long claw. When I look past it, I see Mother’s face wearing that thousand-yard stare out the back door. Her jaw is jutting out and held tight to keep her East Coast lockjaw accent going. The back door she’s staring through opens on a wet black night. You can smell banana from the tree she planted outside last summer (a plantain tree, really), and the thick sweet of honeysuckle. The cape jasmine bush has, for no reason at all, burst out these white waxy blooms. It’s winter and the bush shouldn’t be blooming at all. Mother says the smell reminds her of the gardenia corsage she wore on her wrist that night she went to see Callas. She pulled up to the big fountain in a taxi behind a long black car with silver bud vases on the insides, next to the windows. At this point, I pipe up that I’ve never seen a fountain, other than the water-drinking kind in school. And this whaps Mother loose from the memory for a second. She looks at me full in the face and asks is my childhood that deprived. Then Lecia says that I’m full of shit, that I’ve seen the fountain at the bank (the one high school kids are always putting soap bubbles in), and the other fountain at the Houston museum, not to mention umpteen-zillion fountains in books on Florentine architecture that Mother has dragged me through. Lecia says I’m just interrupting to hear myself talk and should shut up. And I say it’s Lecia who’s interrupting. Mother finally sighs her stop-bickering sigh. For a minute she looks out the screen door at that big rectangle of semitropical night. We get quiet and watch her watching. Then the music surges a little, like a wave rising up, and she fades away from us, back into her Manhattan taxi outside the Metropolitan again. She reminds us about the limo up ahead of her, and says that out of that limo comes a white satin high heel and the drapy tail end of a white sequined evening gown slipping under the hem of a coat that looked to her like sheared beaver dyed the color of cream. Then on top of that shoe and gown pours none other than Marlene Dietrich. (If Daddy had been present, he would have reminded us at length at this point that Dietrich had kissed him full on the mouth during a USO show. Hence my middle name: Marlene.) For a minute her eyes lock on Mother’s through the glass before the autograph hounds swooped around.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  legal struggle and comforting hope of Judaism, repeat themselves in every individual believer; for man is made for Christ, and "his heart is restless, till it rests in Christ."52 § 9. Judaism. Literature. I. Sources. 1. The Canonical Books of the O. and N. Testaments. 2. The Jewish Apocrypha. Best edition by Otto Frid. Fritzsche: Libri Apocryphi Veteris Testamenti Graece. Lips. 1871. German Commentary by Fritzsche and Grimm, Leipz. 1851–’60 (in the "Exeget. Handbuch zum A. T."); English Com. by Dr. E. C. Bissell, N. York, 1880 (vol. xxv. in Schaff’s ed. of Lange’s Bible-Work). 3. Josephus (a Jewish scholar, priest, and historian, patronized by Vespasian and Titus, b. A.D. 37, d. about 103): Antiquitates Judaicae (jArcaiologiva jIoudaikhv), in 20 books, written first (but not preserved) in Aramaic, and then reproduced in Greek, A.D. 94, beginning with the creation and coming down to the outbreak of the rebellion against the Romans, A.D. 66, important for the post-exilian period. Bellum Judaicum (peri; tou' jIoudai>vkou' polevmou), in 7 books, written about 75, from his own personal observation (as Jewish general in Galilee, then as Roman captive, and Roman agent), and coming down to the destruction of Jerusalem, A.D. 70. Contra. Apionem, a defence of the Jewish nation against the calumnies of the grammarian Apion. His Vita or Autobiography was written after A.D. 100.—Editions of Josephus by Hudson, Oxon. 1720, 2 vols. fol.; Havercamp, Amst. 1726, 2 fol.; Oberthür, Lips. 1785, 3 vols.; Richter, Lips. 1827, 6 vols.; Dindorf, Par. 1849, 2 vols.; Imm. Bekker, Lips. 1855, 6 vols. The editions of Havercamp and Dindorf are the best. English translations by Whiston and Traill, often edited, in London, New York, Philadelphia. German translations by Hedio, Ott, Cotta, Demme. 4. Philo of Alexandria (d. after A.D. 40) represents the learned and philosophical (Platonic) Judaism. Best ed. by Mangey, Lond. 1742, 2 fol., and Richter, Lips. 1828, 2 vols. English translation by C. D. Yonge, London, 1854, 4 vols. (in Bohn’s "Ecclesiastical Library"). 5. The Talmud (T'l]mWd i.e. Doctrine) represents the traditional, post-exilian, and anti-Christian Judaism. It consists of the Mishna (!iv]n:h ,, deutevrwsi" Repetition of the Law), from the end of the second century, and the Gemara (gÒm;r;a i.e. Perfect Doctrine, from gÉm'r to bring to an end). The latter exists in two forms, the Palestinian Gemara, completed at Tiberias about A.D. 350, and the Babylonian Gemara of the sixth century. Best eds. of the Talmud by Bomberg, Ven. 1520 sqq. 12 vols. fol., and Sittenfeld, Berlin, 1862–’68, 12 vols. fol. Latin version of the Mishna by G. Surenhusius, Amst. 1698–1703, 6 vols. fol.; German by J. J. Rabe, Onolzbach, 1760–’63. 6. Monumental Sources: of Egypt (see the works of Champollion, Young, Rosellini, Wilkinson, Birch, Mariette, Lepsius, Bunsen, Ebers, Brugsch, etc.); of Babylon and Assyria (see Botta, Layard, George Smith, Sayce, Schrader, etc.). 7. Greek and Roman authors: Polybius (d. b.c. 125), Diodorus Siculus (contemporary of Caesar), Strabo ((d. A.D. 24), Tacitus (d. about 117), Suetonius(d. about 130), Justinus (d. after A.D. 160).