“So here, twisted in steel, and spoiled with redyour sunlight hide, smelling of death and fear,they crushed out your throat the terrible songyou sang in the dark ranges. With what cryingyou mourned him! - the drinker of blood, the swift death-bringerwho ran with you so many a night; and the night was long.I heard you, desperate poet, Did you hearmy silent voice take up the cry? - replying:Achilles is overcome, and Hector dead,and clay stops many a warrior's mouth, wild singer.Voice from the hills and the river drunken with rain,for your lament the long night was too brief.Hurling your woes at the moon, that old cleaned bone,till the white shorn mobs of stars on the hill of the skyhuddled and trembled, you tolled him, the rebel one.Insane Andromache, pacing your towers alone,death ends the verse you chanted; here you lie.The lover, the maker of elegies is slain,and veiled with blood her body's stealthy sun.”

“How can you stand without a spine ? Turn your fucking back on me ? Yet I will walk away with a smile. You will become my newest creation. So where has all of this gotten you ? With a blade to your throat. I can smell the fear on you. I will wipe you clean from my memory. You cry out and tremble before me. So prepare to meet your fucking maker. So put your mouth to the curb. Now you're going to be famous”

“Ever felt like you are more than flesh and bones and blood that decay back into cosmic dirt? You are. Your existence did not begin with your birth and it will not end with your death. Your soul lived before and will live on and on and on...so what you do now matters later. Choose wisely.”

“A star dawns in the night. Life through life, blood through blood to shine its light. Through love he was given the gift of birth, and from breath to death will walk the earth. The other gift comes through blood and bone, and is for him to take and own. Charm of the moon, power of the sun. Never forgetting an it harm done.”

“Kali is the goddess of destruction, the Clawed Hands, the Blood Drinker... And that's one side of her, as it is for any god. If you knew her for thousands of years you'd know she could be all colors. The sky is black at night, but if your eyes were good enough, they could see the different lights of a million stars. Death is part of her because death is part of life.”

“Death is a fascinating thing. The human mind continually returns and returns to death, to mortality, immortality, damnation, salvation. Some fear death, some seek it, but it is in our human nature to wonder at the limits of human life, at least. When you are sick like this you begin to wonder too much. Death is at your shoulder, death is your shadow, your scent, your waking and dreaming companion. You cannot help, when sleep begins to touch your eyes, but to wonder: What if? What if? And in that question, there is a longing, too much like the longing of a young girl in love. The sickness occupies your every thought, breath like a lover at your ear; the sickness stands at your shoulder in the mirror, absorbed with your body, each inch of skin and flesh, and you let it work you over, touch you with rough hands that thrill. Nothing will ever be so close to you again. You will never find a lover so careful, so attentive, so unconditionally present and concerned only with you.Some of us use the body to convey the things for which we cannot find words. Some of us decide to take a shortcut, decide the world is too much or too little, death is so easy, so smiling, so simple; and death is dramatic, a final fuck-you to the world.”