Kyan Le

“I suspect there are lots of women who want to become prostitutes. Some see themselves as valued commodities and figure they ought to sell while the price is high. Others feel that sex has no intrinsic meaning in and of itself but allows individuals to feel the reality of their own bodies. A few women despise their existence and the insignificance of their meager lives and want to affirm themselves by controlling sex much as a man would. Then there are those who are actuated by violent, self-destructive behavior. And finally we have those want to offer comfort. I suppose there are any number of women who find the meaning of their existence in similar ways.”
― Natsuo Kirino, Grotesque

“He asked if she sold luminous flowers that he had heard about, flowers which shone in the dark. He wanted them, he said, for a woman who shone in the dark. He could swear that when he took her to the theater and she sat back in the dark in her evening dress, her skin was as luminous as the finest sea shell, with a pale pink glow to it. And he wanted these flowers for her to wear in her hair. Mathilde did not have them. But as soon as the man left she went to look at herself in the mirror. This was the kind of feeling she wanted to inspire. Could she?”
― Anaïs Nin

“Travel"

Sometimes I know I love you better
than all the others I kiss it’s funny

but it’s true and I wouldn’t roll
from one to the next so fast if you

hadn’t knocked them all down like
ninepins when you roared by my bed

I keep trying to race ahead and catch
you at the newest station or whistle

stop but you are flighty about
schedules and always soar away just

as leaning from my taxicab my breath
reaches for the back of your neck”
― Frank O'Hara, The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara

“So much of the pain of loneliness is to do with concealment, with feeling compelled to hide vulnerability, to tuck ugliness away, to cover up scars as if they are literally repulsive. But why hide? What's so shameful about wanting, about desire, about having failed to achieve satisfaction, about experiencing unhappiness? Why this need to constantly inhabit peak states, or to be comfortably sealed inside a unit of two, turned inward from the world at large?”
― Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone