“I don't know exactly what covetous is, but in my experience it is not so much desiring someone else's virtue or happiness as rejecting it, taking offense at the beauty of it.”

Kathy Acker: Where does she get off?
Context: A friend told me that there are these clean and sober dykes that have piercings every couple months just to get high. It's about learning about my body. I didn't know my body could do this. It's not exactly pleasure. It's more like vision. I didn't know the body is such a visionary factory.
Basically we grew up not wanting to know that we had bodies. And it's not as if these piercings are in that deep — it's just on the surface. So if that little thing can do so much, who knows what else we can experience?

Source: "Vice Adm. John D. Bulkeley, 84, Hero of D-Day and Philippines" in The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/1996/04/08/us/vice-adm-john-d-bulkeley-84-hero-of-d-day-and-philippines.html (8 April 1996)

The simple things are hardest (2005)

Quotations from Gurudev’s teachings, Chinmya Mission Chicago

Source: Hotel du Lac

Source: She's Come Undone

Source: Just Listen

Source: Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac