RAGNA: All you do not take from the world the world takes from you, all the flowering plants you have denied yourself are full of you, your presence … - Djuna Barnes

And once Father Lucas said to me, 'Be simple, Matthew, life is a simple book, and an open book, read and be simple as the beasts in the field; just being miserable isn't enough — you've got to know how.' So I got to thinking and I said to myself, 'This is a terrible thing that Father Lucas has put on me — be simple like the beasts and yet think and harm nobody.

You’ve got to listen! She would come back to me after a night all over the city and lie down beside me and she would say, ‘I want to make everyone happy,’ and her mouth was drawn down. ‘I want everyone to be gay, gay. Only you,’ she said, holding me, ‘only you, you mustn’t be gay or happy, not like that, it’s not for you, only for everyone else in the world.’ She knew she was driving me insane with misery and fright; only,” she went on, “she couldn’t do anything because she was a long way off and waiting to begin. It’s for that reason she hates everyone near her. It’s why she falls into everything, like someone in a dream. It’s why she wants to be loved and left alone, all at the same time. She would kill the world to get at herself if the world were in the way, and it is in the way. A shadow was falling on her — mine — and it was driving her out of her wits.

Such a woman is the infected carrier of the past: before her the structure of our head and jaws ache - we feel that we could eat her, she who is eaten death returning, for only then do we put our face close to the blood on the lips of our forefathers.