“Ya’ll, I know this world is far from perfect.
I am not the type to mistake a streetlight for the moon.
I know our wounds are deep as the Atlantic.
But every ocean has a shoreline
and every shoreline has a tide
that is constantly returning
to wake the songbirds in our hands,
to wake the music in our bones,
to place one fearless kiss on the mouth of that brave river
that has to run through the center of our hearts
to find its way home.”
-Andrea Gibson, from her poem “Birthday”

“To understand madness, perhaps, we must view reason as a lens; a secondary quality that is color; neither fundamental nor foundational.”
-Caryn and I, concluding a six-hour conversation at Cafe Le Caire

“Individuals are to operate as their own legislator and judge of laws holding for individuals. Individuality may claim the privilege of enunciating laws universal in character having their source and inspiration solely in the single individual.”
-Hegel

“Fantasy, then, is not the opposite of reality but what reality forecloses and as a result defines for itself, quite boldly, the limits of reality, and its constituents.”
-Judith Butler, in “Undoing Gender”