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.

Page 148 of 170 · 20 per page

• From Bestiary (2020)

  She welded her left hand to the doorframe, held the dark open for us to exit through. The night was the same throat-dark as the inside of her house, and leaving felt like being swallowed, like symmetry: The farther we drove, the lower down we lived in her throat. We didn’t know if she was waiting for us to leave or to come back, only that she stood there longer than I looked, that the road startled like skin when we backed onto it. Even after we left, I found her face in a palm tree, a run-over dog, cows scabbing over a field, the dark bracketing our car, my mother in the rearview mirror, teething on her tongue to keep herself awake, one hand hooking out the window. Her fingers undoing the button of the moon. With my sleeve, I dabbed at the window like a wound, tried to wipe away Ama’s resemblance to the night. She let us go because years ago she’d tried to sever herself from her daughters, and not even the river could cut through them. She let us go, knowing she was with us in the car and in our yard, a fishline threaded through our spines. When I was home, I walked between my yard-holes, knowing Ama was on the other end of them. I fed my hands to the 口, imagined that Ama was doing the same on her end, our hands touching halfway between her city and mine, knotting at the wrist-root. This was the only way we could see each other, with our hands alone: without our full bodies to hurt each other, without words to want from each other. In the holes, a reforested dark. In a month, a tree would grow from the 口, a subterranean sapling just beginning to breach ground, touch night. The tree would have bark thick as buckles, a hollow trunk. It would grow to her height, dress in her shadow, a tree narrating her absence. In a month, when the tree braided out of the hole, born from no seed but my hands, I would water it. * Fact: The Nationalists confiscated my grandmother’s land a second time. Watakushi, she said again and again. It is mine. It is mine. She claims her land in a language that’s not hers. She lines up her Is like a fence: IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII. The I doesn’t indicate a presence but an absence, the place where a body has been redacted from the sentence. Story: Ama married a soldier, the only type of man who keeps his job forever. In return, she received a daily ration of rice.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Kitty’s the Prince, and I’m Dandini. I have to speak, sing, dance, slap my thigh, the works, in velvet breeches. And the crowd go mad for it!’ He smiled at my pleasure - it was lovely to be allowed to be pleased with myself, at last! - then shook his head. ‘Your folks, from what I’ve heard them say, don’t know the half of it. Why don’t you have them up to see you on the stage? Why the big secret?’ I shrugged, then hesitated; then, ‘Alice doesn’t care for Kitty ...’ I said. ‘And you and Kitty: you’re still in her pocket? You’re still struck with her like you always was?’ I nodded. He sniffed. ‘Then, she’s a lucky girl ...’ He seemed only to be flirting again; but I had the queerest impression, too, that he knew more than he was letting on - and didn’t care a fig about it. I answered, ‘I’m the lucky one,’ and held his gaze. He tapped with his pen again upon his blotter. ‘Maybe.’ Then he winked. I stayed at the Palace until it became rather obvious that Tony had other business to get on with, then took my leave of him. Once outside, I stood again before the foyer doors, reluctant to resign the reek of beer and grease-paint and confront the altogether different scents of Whitstable, our Parlour and our home. It had been good to talk of Kitty - so good that, seated at the supper-table later, between silent Alice and nasty Rhoda with her tiny, flashing sapphire, I missed her all the more. I was due to spend another day with them, but now I thought I could not face it. I said, as we started on our puddings, that I had changed my mind and would take the morning, rather than the evening train tomorrow - that I had remembered things that I must do at the theatre, that I shouldn’t put off till Thursday. They didn’t seem surprised, though Father said it was a shame. Later, as I kissed them good-night, he cleared his throat. ‘There you are,’ he said, ‘back up to London in the morning, and I’ve barely had time for a proper look at you.’ I smiled. ‘Have you had a nice time with us, Nance?’ ‘Oh yes.’ ‘And you will take care of yourself, in London?’ asked Mother. ‘It seems very far away.’ I laughed. ‘It’s not so far.’ ‘Far enough,’ she said, ‘to keep you from us for a year and a half.’ ‘I’ve been busy,’ I said. ‘We have been terribly busy, both of us.’

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  What I say is, if you’re not going to make an uncle of her, then, really, consider your friends, and pass her on to somebody who will.’ ‘You ain’t having her!’ ‘I don’t want anyone, now I’ve found Sue Bridehead. But there, you see, you do care for her!’ ‘Of course I care for her,’ said Florence quietly. Now I was listening so hard I felt I could hear her blinking, pursing her lips. ‘Well then! Bring her to the boy tomorrow night’ - I was sure that’s what she said. ‘Bring her to the boy. You can meet my Miss Raymond...’ ‘I don’t know,’ answered Florence. The words were followed by a silence. And when Annie spoke next, it was in a slightly different tone. ‘You cannot grieve for her for ever,’ she said. ‘She would never have wanted that...’ Florence tutted. ‘Being in love, you know,’ she said, ‘it’s not like having a canary, in a cage. When you lose one sweetheart, you can’t just go out and get another to replace her.’ ‘I thought that’s exactly what you were supposed to do!’ ‘That’s what you do, Annie.’ ‘But Florence - you might just let the cage door open, just a little ... There is a new canary in your own front room, banging its handsome head against the bars.’ ‘Suppose I let the new one in,’ said Flo then, ‘then find I don’t care for it, as much as I did the old one? Suppose - Oh!’ I heard a thump. ‘I can’t believe that you have got me here, comparing her to a budgie!’ I knew she meant Lilian, not me; and I turned my head away, and wished I hadn’t listened after all. The parlour remained quiet for a second or two, and I heard Florence dip her spoon into her cup, and stir it. Then, before I had quite tiptoed back into the kitchen, her voice came again, but rather quietly. ‘Do you think it’s true, though, what you said, about the new canary and the bars ... ?’ My foot caught a broom, then, and sent it falling; and I had to give a shout and slap my hands, as if I had just that moment come home. Annie called me in and said that tea was brewed. Florence seemed to raise her eyes to mine, a little thoughtfully. Annie left soon after, and Florence busied herself, all night, with paper-work: she had lately got herself a pair of spectacles, and with them flashing firelight all night, I could not even see which way her glances tended - to me, or to her books. We said good-night in our usual way, but then we both lay wakeful.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  She welded her left hand to the doorframe, held the dark open for us to exit through. The night was the same throat-dark as the inside of her house, and leaving felt like being swallowed, like symmetry: The farther we drove, the lower down we lived in her throat. We didn’t know if she was waiting for us to leave or to come back, only that she stood there longer than I looked, that the road startled like skin when we backed onto it. Even after we left, I found her face in a palm tree, a run-over dog, cows scabbing over a field, the dark bracketing our car, my mother in the rearview mirror, teething on her tongue to keep herself awake, one hand hooking out the window. Her fingers undoing the button of the moon. With my sleeve, I dabbed at the window like a wound, tried to wipe away Ama’s resemblance to the night. She let us go because years ago she’d tried to sever herself from her daughters, and not even the river could cut through them. She let us go, knowing she was with us in the car and in our yard, a fishline threaded through our spines. When I was home, I walked between my yard-holes, knowing Ama was on the other end of them. I fed my hands to the 口 , imagined that Ama was doing the same on her end, our hands touching halfway between her city and mine, knotting at the wrist-root. This was the only way we could see each other, with our hands alone: without our full bodies to hurt each other, without words to want from each other. In the holes, a reforested dark. In a month, a tree would grow from the 口 , a subterranean sapling just beginning to breach ground, touch night. The tree would have bark thick as buckles, a hollow trunk. It would grow to her height, dress in her shadow, a tree narrating her absence. In a month, when the tree braided out of the hole, born from no seed but my hands, I would water it. * Fact: The Nationalists confiscated my grandmother’s land a second time. Watakushi, she said again and again. It is mine. It is mine. She claims her land in a language that’s not hers. She lines up her I s like a fence: IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII. The I doesn’t indicate a presence but an absence, the place where a body has been redacted from the sentence. Story: Ama married a soldier, the only type of man who keeps his job forever. In return, she received a daily ration of rice.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  That was the Confucian dilemma—similar to the impasse that Ashoka had encountered on the Indian subcontinent. Empire depended on force and intimidation, because the aristocrats and the masses had to be held in check. Even if he had wanted to, Emperor Wu could not afford to rule entirely by ren. The Chinese Empire had been achieved by warfare, wholesale slaughter, and the annihilation of one state after another; it retained its power by military expansion and internal oppression and developed religious mythologies and rituals to sacralize these arrangements. Was there a realistic alternative? The Warring States period had shown what happened when ambitious rulers with new weapons and large armies competed against one another pitilessly for dominance, devastating the countryside and terrorizing the population in the process. Contemplating this chronic warfare, Mencius had longed for a king who would rule “all under Heaven” and bring peace to the great plain of China. The ruler who had been powerful enough to achieve this was the First Emperor. a In this chapter, I have used the Pinyin method of Romanizing the Chinese script; I have given the Wade-Giles version as an alternative in cases when this form may be more familiar to a Western audience.b Tao Te Ching in the Wade-Giles system.4 [image file=image_rsrcDZB.jpg] The Hebrew DilemmaWhen Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden, they probably did not fall into a state of original sin, as Saint Augustine believed, but into an agrarian economy.1 Man (adam) had been created from the soil (adamah), which in the Garden of Eden was watered by a simple spring. Adam and his wife were free agents, living a life of idyllic liberty, cultivating the garden at their leisure, and enjoying the companionship of their god, Yahweh. But because of a single act of disobedience, Yahweh condemned them both to a life sentence of hard agricultural labor: Accursed be the soil because of you! With suffering shall you get your food from it every day of your life. It shall yield you brambles and thistles, and you shall eat wild plants. With sweat on your brow shall you eat your bread, until you return to the soil as you were taken from it. For dust you are, and to dust you shall return.2 Instead of peacefully nurturing the soil as its master, Adam had become its slave. From the very beginning, the Hebrew Bible strikes a different note from most of the texts we have considered so far. Its heroes were not members of an aristocratic elite; Adam and Eve had been relegated to mere field hands, scratching a miserable subsistence from the blighted land.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  A lace of holes where I’ve written the words and then erased them, inventing a language from friction: Dear Ama, You define a daughter as something done to you at night without your permission I dream Agong in the window a face I forage for resemblance the only thing we share is sorry you say there’s no such thing as death only debt only deferring the next life I once thought you’d given birth to me directly skipped my mother entirely you conceived me by screaming into a peach eating around its seed planting it inside your shit watering it into me a story like all stories treeing out of you all stories are about ownership I’m mistaken: you aren’t the tiger spirit you’re the woman it wears you tell me choices are made by men militaries language is not what’s said but what’s silenced Agong told me today I could become anything by mimicking it he lay down in the middle of every road said now I’m every way home I pen his mouth here by punching the page Agong kneels in the yard digs a birdbath where I rinse my hands you say a mouth is all I wanted for you my name goes nude maiden name meaning what survives is what I choose to remember _ After I feed the letters back, Ben and I stand over the holes as they breathe. The moon a bared tooth. We ask our mothers if we can sleep out in the yard tonight, and when they both say no, we do it anyway, build a tent out of blankets and brooms. My mother watches us out the window for an hour, then comes out with a quilt to use as our roof, the one with Ama’s denim river sutured down its center. She brings the border to her nose and breathes all the blue out of the fabric. Then she hooks the blanket over our broomsticks, hanging it above us, and the river is resurrected as our sky. Ben and I fall asleep paired like quotation marks, my mother between us, my mother the thing we speak. I couch my head on my mother’s belly and listen to her bowels fill with wing-beats. She perches her fingers in my hair and names each strand with her hands, singing a song that Agong learned from the crows, a song about camphor trees that grow to be girls. My mother rolls my head off her belly, reaches down for my feet and says they’re ripe enough to eat. Imagine this: I eat your foot like a fruit. I shit out its seed in some city far from here. The seed grows into a tree. You walk by the tree and know I’ve been there. You cut down the tree, count its rings, add it to how old I am. Wherever you’re going, I’m already there, a tree waiting.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  Highly stylized videos notwithstanding, one can never know what goes through the mind of suicide bombers at the moment when they drive trucks into a building or detonate bombs in a crowded marketplace. To imagine they do this entirely for God or that they are impelled solely by Islamic teaching is to ignore the natural complexity of all human motivation. Forensic psychiatrists who have interviewed survivors found that the desire to become a hero and achieve posthumous immortality was also a strong factor. Other would-be martyrs cited the ekstasis of battle that gives life meaning and purpose, a feeling that is close to religious exaltation, as we have seen. In fact, it is said, the Hamas rank-and-file lived not for “politics, nor ideology, nor religion … but rather an ecstatic camaraderie in the face of death ‘on the path of Allah.’ ”94 Life under occupation held little attraction for many of the volunteers; their bleak life in Gaza’s refugee camps made the possibility of a blissful hereafter and a glorious reputation here on earth powerfully alluring. But then all communities throughout history have praised the warrior who gives his life for his people. Palestinians also honor those who are killed involuntarily in the conflict with Israel; they too are shahid, because as the ahadith made clear, any untimely death was a “witness” to both human finitude and the nation’s plight.95 It further complicates the question of faith and terrorism that the suicide killer has been revered as a hero in other religious traditions as well. In the story of Samson, the judge who died pulling the Temple of Dagon down upon the Philistine chieftains, the biblical author does not agonize over his motives but simply celebrates his courage.96 Samson “heroically hath finished a life heroic,” the devout Puritan John Milton likewise concluded in Samson Agonistes:97 Nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail Or knock the breast; no weakness, no contempt, Dispraise or blame; nothing but well and fair, And what may quiet us in a death so noble.98 Far from inspiring horror, Samson’s end left those who witnessed it with a sense of “peace and consolation … and calm of mind, all passion spent.”99 Not coincidentally, Israel calls its nuclear capacity “the Samson Option,” regarding a strike that would inevitably result in the destruction of the nation to be an honorable duty and a possibility that the Jewish state has freely chosen.100 The anthropologist Talal Asad has suggested that the suicide bomber is simply acting out this same appalling scenario on a smaller scale and can therefore “be seen to belong to the modern Western tradition of armed conflict for the defense of the free political community. To save the tradition (or to found its state) in confronting a dangerous enemy, it may be necessary to act without being bound by ordinary moral constraints.”101

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

  "Yes, very; and so was I of her. Moreover—had I not been given to those propensities which I dared not avow to her, and which only tribades can understand; had I, like other men of my age, been living a merry life of fornication with whores, mistresses, and lively grisettes—I should often have made her the confidante of my erotic exploits, for in the moment of bliss our prodigal feelings are often blunted by the too great excess, whilst the remembrance doled out at our will is a real twofold pleasure of the senses and of the mind. "Teleny, however, had of late become a kind of bar between us, and I think she had got to be rather jealous of him, for his name seemed to have become as objectionable to her as it formerly had been to me." "Did she begin to suspect your liaison?" "I did not know whether she suspected it, or if she was beginning to be jealous of the affection I bore him. "Matters, however, were coming to a crisis, and were shaping towards the dreadful way in which they ended. "One day a grand concert was to be given at——, and L—— who was to play having been taken ill, Teleny was asked to take his place. It was an honour he could not refuse. "'I am loath to leave you,' said he, 'even for a day or two, for I know that just now you are so busy that you cannot possibly get away, especially as your manager is ill.' "'Yes,' said I, 'it is rather awkward, still I might——' "'No, no, it would be foolish; I'll not allow you.' "'But you know it is so long since you played at a concert where I was not present.' "You'll be present in mind if not in body. I shall see you sitting in your usual place, and I shall play for you and you alone. Besides, we have never been parted for any length of time—no, not for a single day since Briancourt's letter. Let us try and see if we can live apart for two days. Who knows? Perhaps, some time or other——' "'What do you mean?' "'Nothing, only you might get tired of this life. You might, like other men, marry just to have a family.' "'A family!' I burst out laughing. 'Is that encumbrance so very necessary to a man's happiness?' "'My love might surfeit you.' "'Réné, don't speak in that way! Could I live without you?' "He smiled incredulously. "'What! do you doubt my love?' "'Can I doubt that the stars are fire? but,' continued he, slowly, and looking at me, 'do you doubt mine?' "It seemed to me as if he had grown pale when he put that question to me. "'No. Have you ever given me the slightest cause to doubt it?' "'And if I were unfaithful?'

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

  Behind him, the bottles staggered up on their little choir risers—amber and green and clear bottles, and one bottle of luminous yellow chartreuse shining out of the back line like some brand of rocket fuel. I looked across the bar and caught in the mirror on the back wall a long view of my pudgy eye, misshapen and caked with powder. Daddy would have been proud of that eye , I thought, and slid off the stool. In the unheated bathroom, you could actually see your breath. I wiped Mother’s makeup off with a glob of toilet paper I’d wetted down using tap water. Then I used the hand drier fixed to the wall to blow my face dry, as much to warm up as anything. Standing there by myself, with my eyes closed and that hot wind huffing down on my features so I could feel my hair stream behind me and some blood start seeping back to my bunged-up eye, I had a sudden flood of homesickness. Once I’d ridden in the back of Daddy’s truck all the way from the beach. The sun that day had made even the nailheads on the floor of his truck bed hot enough to scald your bare foot if you set it down on one. The back of Daddy’s head in his red Lone Star cap had been fixed like an icon in the rear window. I’d turned from him to lean my face up to the sun. The wind itself was hot but somehow kept me from sweating awful much. Still, that night I had a blistering sunburn on my face, which Daddy patted cool with Noxzema. The memory clicked off with the drier, as if the power on it got cut too. I hoisted myself up the sink’s edge to check out that bruise again, using the rectangular mirror on the towel dispenser. The eye had swollen back up glossy blue-black, with a streak of green at the edge. Daddy would have called it a kick-ass shiner. Later when I lay half dozing on the banquette in the bar’s darkest corner, I could almost see Daddy taking form from the vast ether of alcohol fumes and smoke. Finally, he sat next to me. Or a ghost of him sat, for I wasn’t crazy enough to have believed that the Daddy-shape I’d conjured was actual. I knew full well he wasn’t. Still, it comforted me to see him assemble through the veil of my own lashes. He sat gangly inside his creased khakis. “You gotta keep your guard up,” he finally said. He drew a smoke from the tight line of Camels lined up like organ pipes. The glass on the black tabletop was only a little more transparent than he was. I told him I was missing him awful, but he just shrugged that off. “And lead with your left. Then she can’t reach that eye.

• 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 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 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 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 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 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 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).

• From The Art of Memoir

  So he can devote a chapter to butterfly hunting, while his father being shot in exile occupies less than a moment, and the two events in no way seem off balance in the writer’s account books. Of course, it’s his father who taught him to stalk through the fields with a net, so in some way the folded, papery insects are paternal heirlooms, short-lived flying flowers—sacred icons from the divine patriarch known for his cutlass and boxed dueling pistols. The whole Russian revolution that ruined his family in every sense is mere background music to Nabokov’s refinement. It will take a keen eye and keener taste and the keenest of philosophical minds to rescue his lost beloveds from the ravages of time, and it’s his inability to control time externally—to resurrect them—that serves as his inner enemy. In a great memoir, some aspect of the writer’s struggle for self often serves as the book’s organizing principle, and the narrator’s battle to become whole rages over the book’s trajectory. So being an aficionado of beauty and philosophy makes Nabokov’s parents “alive” for him in the book. In this way, developing his aesthetic sensibility becomes a life-or-death matter, not a peacock’s vain preening. Part of his singular skill—manifested in his voice—is translating philosophical ideas into physical or carnal metaphors; in this way he is not unlike Babel and Batuman. He’ll somehow smoosh ideas into unforgettable images. Instead of saying, as I might, dully enough, “The whole universe is small compared to a single memory,” Nabokov injects feeling into the idea—and makes it syntactically memorable as hell—by conjuring his own wonder with an image we’ll find wonderful ourselves. How small the cosmos (a kangaroo’s pouch would hold it), how paltry and puny in comparison to human consciousness, to a single individual recollection, and its expression in words! Like any master writer, he’s found the “trick” of doing what he most excels at: structuring the voice so that his talent sits in the foreground.