“That night I watch his eyes go flat, absolutely under my reign, while his body over me is sodden with joy. I have a squalid sense of victory over him. I do not desire him, all this now is patience on my part; an animal loneliness and also a kind of whoredom. Next, thinks a whore. Next, think I.

Clearly the fever in this unlovely affair is the vulgarity. The calm found only in bed after the act. A bad calm, full of knowledge that this sweet exhaustion is momentary, that in the daytime our ugly tempers will muck all that went before. But the fight is unfair; I am superior even though I seem to lose. I allow him to win as soon as I feel his stark, desperate love. For I am sure the only tender moments in his life are with me. Underneath his dreadful breeding, inside the heart of this merchant there is a soft man, seen only by me, his first love.

This flesh bath is growing tepid. I begin to smell him. Horrid preoccupation with new details of him, smells, gestures. Even as I use him night after night, the judgment of him continues. The decline brings nastiness but I savour it. Survival is an ugly struggle. Success is in one more tentacle to make me more fit in this complicated world. I am an octopus swimming off in a new direction, quickly, so that my arms will not pull me to pieces inside the trap.

Watching him eat, I really must leave the table. Terrible mixing of foods in his mouth, eating with such concentration. That which makes him exciting in bed oddly enough makes him intolerable in common life. Real gluttony. How vulgar this insistence on doing only what he is doing, as though he has killed the rest of his life. He gorges himself, is made nervous and sick by his appetite. He cannot accept more than what he can hear or touch. There is so much more, but he is afraid.

He washes, washes before and after love, keeping busy, shutting out the afterward, which for me is the only reality. What I do with him, what he considers the real present, I think of as a lapse in me, longing for the solid creaking plane above me ploughing through an abstract beautiful sky, arriving nowhere, but having been everywhere.

It's true I needed him to fill in the blank. But to love him would never hurt me because I never valued him. My investment was small, worth a piece of skin only organ deep. I can cut him out as one can cut the genitals of a man. As one can never cut off the real, slow sadness of thought.”

Sicily Enough, Claire Rabe

“Where do we go from here?
The words are coming out all weird
Where are you now, when I need you.”

The Bends, Radiohead Recommended by holly.

“There are two things we must get rid of early in life: a feeling of personal superiority and an exaggerated reverence for the sexual act.”

The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand

“Erotic love is one of the highest forms of contemplation.”

Kenneth Rexroth

“It was raining. Enveloped in a large T-shirt which he had lent me I was leaning on the window-sill, kneeling on the chair placed against the wall. If I knew the language of the rain, of course, I would write it down, but everyone recognises it, and is able to recall it to their memory. Being in a closed space while outside all is water, trickling, drowning ... Making love in the cramped backseat of a car, while windows and roof resonate with the monotonous rain-drops... The rain undoes bodies, makes them full of softness and damp patches... slimy and slobbering like snails...”

Le Boucher, Alina Reyes

“Love is the pain you can't refuse.”

Speed Of Light, Rhodez

“She says : I do not know
if sex is an illusion

I do not know
who I was when I did those things
or who I said I was
or whether I willed to feel
what I had read about
or who in fact there was with me
or whether I knew, even then
that there was doubt about these things.”

Dialogue, Adrienne Rich

“Somewhere someone is thinking of you. Someone is calling you an angel. This person is using celestial colors to paint your image. Someone is making you into a vision so beautiful that it can only live in the mind. Someone is thinking of the way your breath escapes your lips when you are touched. How your eyes close and your jaw tightens with concentration as you give pleasure a home. These thoughts are saving a life somewhere right now. In some airless apartment on a dark, urine stained, whore lined street, someone is calling out to you silently and you are answering without even being there. So crystalline. So pure. Such life saving power when you smile. You will never know how you have cauterized my wounds. So sad that we will never touch. How it hurts me to know that I will never be able to give you everything I have.”

Solipsist, Henry Rollins

“I don't know a lot about her
But she, she knew a lot about me
Her family seemed to love her
If what they say is true
Her friends all share the good times man
That girl has love
That girl has I, I didn't have a clue then
That a kiss would change my whole life again
She walked into my room
When I was all alone
She told me I would date her from September till December
She doesn't know things will never be the same again
She'll always be seventeen
That girl has love
She kept all the pain inside
Now she has got nothing to hide
At such a young age she took her own life
Now she's seeing things that come in our dreams at night
She's a dreamer
That was too real to ever be fake
That was too srong to ever be forgotten
That girl has love.”

That Girl Has Love, Rooney Recommended by Bonna.

“Rahel never wrote to him. There are things that you can't do — like writing letters to a part of yourself. To your feet or hair. Or heart.”

The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy

“'You love your parents, don't you?'
'Yes, I do - very much,' Teddy said, 'but you want to make me use that word to mean what you want it to mean - I can tell.'
'All right. In what sense do you want to use it?'
Teddy thought it over. 'You know what the word 'affinity' means?' he asked, turning to Nicholson.
'I have a rough idea,' Nicholson said dryly.
'I have a very strong affinity for them. They're my parents, I mean, and we're all part of each other's harmony and everything,' Teddy said. 'I want them to have a nice time while they're alive, because they like having a nice time... But they don't love me and Booper - that's my sister - that way. I mean they don't seem able to love us just the way we are. They don't seem able to love us unless they can keep changing us a little bit. They love their reasons for loving us almost as much as they love us, and most of the time more. It's not so good, that way.'”

Teddy, J.D. Salinger

“Each cut, each scar, each burn; a different wound or time. I told him what the first one was. I told him where the second one came from--I remembered them all. And for the first time in my life I felt beautiful. Finally part of the earth. I touched the soil, and he loved me back.”

Secretary [movie] Recommended by Kristin.

“In one way or another I've always suffered. I didn't know why exactly, but I do know that I'm not so scared of suffering now. I feel more than I've ever felt and I've found someone to feel with, to play with, to love in a way that feels right for me. I hope he knows that I can see that he suffers too, and that I want to love him.”

Secretary [movie]

“Who's to say that love needs to be soft and gentle?”

Secretary [movie]

“Pain in itself is only sensation and it is our attitudes of resistance to it, and fear, that make it uncomfortable. These attitudes are conditioning and can be released, or simply traded for more fulfilling attitudes. Acceptance and gratitude. Offer it love, instead.”

Why Seek Painful Experiences?, Mystress Angelique Serpent

“she is his selection, part time.
you know the story too! look,
when it is over he places her,
like a phone, back on the hook.”

You All Know the Story of the Other Woman, Anne Sexton

“Doubt thou the stars are fire;
Doubt that the sun doth move;
Doubt truth to be a liar;
But never doubt I love.”

Hamlet, William Shakespeare

“Is love a tender thing? It is too rough, too rude, too boisterous, and it pricks like thorn.”

Romeo And Juliet, William Shakespeare

“Love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs:
Being purged, a fire sparkling in lovers' eyes;
Being vexed, a sea nourished with lovers' tears.
What is it else? A madness most discreet,
A choking gall and a preserving sweet.”

Romeo And Juliet, William Shakespeare

“Being your slave, what should I do but tend
Upon the hours and times of your desire?
I have no precious time at all to spend,
Nor services to do till you require.”

Sonnet 57, William Shakespeare

“Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou are more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd:
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course, untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st:
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.”

Sonnet XVIII, William Shakespeare

“Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us.
These, our bodies, possessed by light.
Tell me we’ll never get used to it.”

Scheherazade, Richard Siken

“You're in a car with a beautiful boy, and he won't tell you that he loves you, but he loves you. And you feel like you've done something terrible, like robbed a liquor store, or swallowed pills, or shoveled yourself a grave in the dirt, and you're tired. You're in a car with a beautiful boy, and you're trying not to tell him that you love him, and you're trying to choke down the feeling, and you're trembling, but he reaches over and he touches you, like a prayer for which no words exist, and you feel your heart taking root in your body, like you've discovered something you didn't even have a name for.”

You Are Jeff, Richard Siken

“To be loved, you have to be nice to people every day but to be hated, you don't have to do squat.”

The Simpsons [television show]

“I need someone to ease my mind - but sometimes a someone is so hard to find.”

In The Arms Of Sleep, Smashing Pumpkins