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“You made me who I am today, Nanni. Wherever I go, everyone I see and crave is ultimately measured by the glow of your light. If my life were a boat, you were the one who stepped on board, turned on its running lights, and was never heard from again. All this might as well be in my head, and in my head it stays. But I've lived and loved by your light alone. In a bus, on a busy street, in class, in a crowded concert hall, once or twice a year, whether for a man or a woman, my heart still jolts when I spot your look-alike. We love only once in our lives, my father had said, sometimes too early, sometimes too late; the other times are always a touch deliberate.”
― André Aciman, Enigma Variations

“I was a candle that had never known a flame, and now that the flame was lit, I softened and glowed in a way I had not known was possible.”
― Danielle Teller, All the Ever Afters: The Untold Story of Cinderella's Stepmother

“It was as though he had awakened something inside her. All those desires she had felt in passing had culminated, growing deeper, hungrier, darker.”
― Nenia Campbell, Star Crossed

“Where is his father?
When will his mother be home?

How is he going to explain
the moon taken hostage, the sea
risen to fill up all the mirrors?

How is he going to explain the branches
beginning to grow from his ribs and throat,
the cries and trills starting in his own mouth?

And now that ancient sorrow between his hips,
his body’s ripe listening;
the planet
knowing itself at last.”
― Li-Young Lee, Book of My Nights: Poems

“In front of me girls were entering and exiting the showers. The flashes of nakedness were like shouts going off. A year or so earlier these same girls had been porcelain figurines, gingerly dipping their toes into the disinfectant basin at the public pool. Now they were magnificent creatures. Moving through the humid air, I felt like a snorkeler. On I came, kicking my heavy, padded legs and gaping through the goalie mask at the fantastic underwater life all around me. Sea anemones sprouted from between my classmatesâ€� legs. They came in all colors, black, brown, electric yellow, vivid red. Higher up, their breasts bobbed like jellyfish, softly pulsing, tipped with stinging pink. Everything was waving in the current, feeding on microscopic plankton, growing bigger by the minute. The shy, plump girls were like sea lions, lurking in the depths.

The surface of the sea is a mirror, reflecting divergent evolutionary paths. Up above, the creatures of air; down below, those of water. One planet, containing two worlds. My classmates were as unastonished by their extravagant traits as a blowfish is by its quills. They seemed to be a different species. It was as if they had scent glands or marsupial pouches, adaptations for fecundity, for procreating in the wild, which had nothing to do with skinny, hairless, domesticated me.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

“Premature as well as retarded awakening of the sexual impulses is not a rare phenomenon among schizoids.”
― Ernst Kretschmer, Physique And Character: An Investigation Of The Nature Of Constitution And Of The Theory Of Temperament