“derelict. my voice cracked and yolk poured out. wind chimes rigid, no breeze, no song. my wings found hidden in your suitcase. pleas for help mistaken for a swan song. i’m stuffing pages from my journal down my throat as kindling. hoping the smoke will get the taste of you out of my mouth. he looks at me from across the room and all i want is to push him against the wall. ravage. ravage. carnage has never been more vogue. is it still art if it doesn’t bring you to your knees? lover, let me prey at your altar. let me bare my fangs in praise. don’t i look so pretty in a funeral shroud? i keep time with the click of my creaking bones. dance with me under the milky translucence of a world suffocating. how did you find me? i buried myself beneath the cicadas. is a girl trapped in glass still a prize?let me get under your skin. i want to know what your fears taste like. i want to consume.”

“I never used to realize it, I guess. I try and play it along and just not make trouble for people. Probably I never would have had any trouble at all if I hadn’t run into Brett when they shipped me to England. I suppose she only wanted what she couldn’t have. Well, people were that way. To hell with people. The Catholic Church had an awfully good way of handling all that. Good advice, anyway. Not to think about it. Oh, it was swell advice. Try and take it sometime. Try and take it.”

“It was masturbation, not willpower, that made it possible for gazillions of women to walk down the aisle with their reputation and their hymen still intact.”

“The Gay, the Straight, the Preacher,The privileged, the homeless, the Teacher.They all hearThe speaking of the Tree.They hear the first and last of every TreeSpeak to humankind today. Come to me, here beside the River.Plant yourself beside the River.”

“Woman, especially her sexuality, provides the object of endless commentary , description, supposition. But the result of all the telling only deepens the enigma and makes woman’s erotic force something that male storytelling can never quite explain or contain.”

“I took her to bed with silk and song’Lay still, my love, I won’t be long,I must prepare my body for passion.”O, your body you give, but all else you ration…”

“Please Tell me what your favorite flavor of ice cream… is”

“It was the impatience of the way he tore my panties from my body, that really turned me on: I was all he could think of, as his lust got the better of him. I glanced back, and saw the underwear torn and discarded, a little strip of thin black material on the floor, and thought, Yes, this is the kind of impatient sex I’m looking for. The way they looked so small, and cruelly forgotten, was a beautiful symbol of how much we both needed to satisfy our lusts.”

“I love being aroused.I relish that delicious feeling of freedom, the delirium of being naked, and my flesh being born again. It’s like I’m being made new.”

“To feel aroused is to feel alive. Having great sex is like taking in huge lungfuls of fresh air, essential to your body, essential to your health, and essential to your life.”

“A voice that had traversed the centuries, so heavy it broke what it touched, so heavy I feared it would ring in me with eternal resonance, a voice rusty with the sound of curses and the hoarse cries that issue from the delta in the last paroxysm of orgasm.”

“It was the wildness of it that got me going: the primal lust, the sheer needs of two people in heat, quickly finding ways to express their sacred hunger to each other in animal passion.”