Death like a lover, caressing him, promising him peace, running its fingers through his hair, its tongue in his ear. She put her own two fingers in her mouth. Im so sorry. And pulled the trigger
Interpretation
This quote explores the complex relationship between death and peace, personifying death as a lover offering solace.
In this quote, Janet Fitch uses vivid imagery to convey the intimate and paradoxical relationship between the subject and death. By describing death as a lover, the quote suggests that the act of dying can be seen as a form of release and comfort, a cessation of suffering, while also highlighting the emotional turmoil involved in the act of taking one's life. The hands-on imagery evokes a sense of finality and bittersweet tranquility, offering a reflective look at the nature of existence and the human experience of despair.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about mental health and the importance of seeking help when feeling overwhelmed.
How could anybody confuse truth with beauty, I thought as I looked at him. Truth came with sunken eyes, bony or scarred, decayed. Its teeth were bad, its hair gray and unkempt. While beauty was empty as a gourd, vain as a parakeet. But it had power. It smelled of musk and oranges and made you close your eyes in a prayer.
I nodded. A man's world. But what did it mean? That men whistled and stared and yelled things at you, and you had to take it, or you get raped or beat up? A man's world meant places men could go but not women. It meant they had more money,and didn't have kids, not the way women did, to look after every second. And it meant that women loved them more than they loved the women, that they could want something with all their hearts, and then not.
Their love as a dragonfly, skimming over echo park, stoppin to visit the lotus. Eating dreams and drinking blue sky.
Whenever she turned her steep focus to me, I felt the warmth that flowers must feel when they bloom through the snow, under the first concentrated rays of the sun.
I hated labels anyway. People didn't fit in slots--prostitute, housewife, saint--like sorting the mail. We were so mutable, fluid with fear and desire, ideals and angles, changeable as water.
I wanted to hear what she was saying. I wanted to smell that burnt midnight again, I wanted to feel that wind. It was a secret wanting, like a song I couldn't stop humming, or loving someone I could never have. No matter where I went, my compass pointed west. I would always know what time it was in California.
Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves.
Near the gates and within two cities there will be scourges the like of which was never seen: famine within plague, people put out by steel, crying to the great immortal God for relief.
Culture is the widening of the mind and of the spirit.
It seemed to her such nonsense-inventing differences, when people, heaven knows, were different enough without that.
To have once been a criminal is no disgrace. To remain a criminal is the disgrace
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
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