Sallie Tisdale quotes:

Humans are a young species, and my little life abides in a very big place, where epochs glide by as swiftly as the mongoose. And strangely enough, when we put our human concerns into their proper, small place, we can turn our attention completely to the small things. To a cricket hidden in a crack of lava. To each other.

But when I look in the basin, among the curdlike blood clots, I see and elfin thorax, attentuated, its pencilline ribs all in parallel rows with tiny knobs of spine rounding upwards. A translucent arm and hand swim beside.

By letting go of dieting, I free up mental and emotional room. I have more space, I can move. The pursuit of another, elusive body, the body someone else says I should have, is a terrible distraction, a side-tracking that might have lasted my whole life long. By letting myself go, I go places.

How I became a better writer was that I kept writing.

It is our peculiar punishment that we know things change and we want this to be otherwise.

Sex can be renounced -- but sexuality cannot. We can't avoid sexual issues by avoiding sex, or by dismissing its importance, or by showing disrespect to our own or other people's sexual feelings.

Sex is a game, a weapon, a toy, a joy, a trance, an enlightenment, a loss, a hope.

Sexual acts are one of the primary means by which we can act out our inarticulated inner lives.

The sex that is presented to us in everyday culture feels strange to me; its images are fragments, lifeless, removed from normal experience. Real sex, the sex in our cells and in the space between our neurons, leaks out and gets into things and stains our vision and colors our lives.

You don't write. You get out of the way.