“I appear at times merry and in good heart, talk, too,before others quite reasonably, and it looks as tho I felt, too, God knows how well within my skin. Yet the soul maintains its deathly sleep and the heart bleeds from a thousand wounds.”

“The soul maintains it's deathly sleep and the heart bleeds from a thousand wounds”

“It is their mores, then, that make the Americans of the United States...capable of maintaining the rule of democracy.... Too much importance is attached to laws and too little to mores.... I am convinced that the luckiest of geographical circumstances and the best of laws cannot maintain a constitution in spite of mores, whereas the latter can turn even the most unfavorable circumstances...to advantage.... If I have not succeeded in making the reader feel the importance I attach to the practical experience of the Americans, to their habits, laws, and, in a word, their mores, I have failed in the main object of my work. -Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in American”

“In two of your poems you called that centralPassage of womanhood a wound,Instead of a curtain guarding a silkenTrail of sighs. How many men,Upon regarding such beauty, helplesslyTouching it, recklessly needingTo enter its warmth again and again,Have assumed it embodies their own acheOf absence, the personalGash that has punished their lives.So endowed of anatomy, any womanWho has been lovedKnows that her tenderest blushOf tissue is a luxe burden of have.Although it bleeds, this is only to cleanse,To prepare yet another nesting for love.It is not a wound, friend.It is a home for you.It is a way into the world.”

“Can human nature ever be wholly and radically transformed? Can the man whom God made good be made wicked by man? Can the soul be reshaped in its entirety by destiny and made evil because destiny is evil? Can the heart become misshapen and afflicted with ugly, incurable deformities under disproportionate misfortune, like a spinal column bent beneath a too low roof?”

“France bleeds, but liberty smiles, and before the smile of liberty, France forgets her wound.”

“She worked to live; then, also to live, for the heart too has its hunger, she loved.”