Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) American poet, novelist and short story writer
Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
Why We Should Say Yes to Drugs http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/05/andrew-sullivan-why-we-should-say-yes-to-drugs.html, New York magazine (25 May, 2018)
Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) American poet, novelist and short story writer
Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
Simone Weil (1909–1943) French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist
Last letter to Father Joseph-Marie Perrin, from a refugee camp in Casablanca (26 May 1942), as translated in The Simone Weil Reader (1957) edited by George A. Panichas, p. 111
Context: Wrongly or rightly you think that I have a right to the name of Christian. I assure you that when in speaking of my childhood and youth I use the words vocation, obedience, spirit of poverty, purity, acceptance, love of one's neighbor, and other expressions of the same kind, I am giving them the exact signification they have for me now. Yet I was brought up by my parents and my brother in a complete agnosticism, and I never made the slightest effort to depart from it; I never had the slightest desire to do so, quite rightly, I think. In spite of that, ever since my birth, so to speak, not one of my faults, not one of my imperfections really had the excuse of ignorance. I shall have to answer for everything on that day when the Lamb shall come in anger.
You can take my word for it too that Greece, Egypt, ancient India, and ancient China, the beauty of the world, the pure and authentic reflections of this beauty in art and science, what I have seen of the inner recesses of human hearts where religious belief is unknown, all these things have done as much as the visibly Christian ones to deliver me into Christ's hands as his captive. I think I might even say more. The love of these things that are outside visible Christianity keeps me outside the Church... But it also seems to me that when one speaks to you of unbelievers who are in affliction and accept their affliction as a part of the order of the world, it does not impress you in the same way as if it were a question of Christians and of submission to the will of God. Yet it is the same thing.
Happy Rhodes (1965) American singer-songwriter
"Hold Me" - Live performance at the Tin Angel (10 May 1996) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcXOiiyHE_c <br class="br">Building the Colossus (1994)
Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) American author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, inventor, civic activist, …
Letter to George Whitefield (19 June 1764), published in The Works of Benjamin Franklin (1856).
Epistles
Harry Chapin (1942–1981) American musician
It Seems You Only Love Me When It Rains
Song lyrics, Living Room Suite (1978)
Nick Hornby book How to Be Good
Variant: The plain state of being human is dramatic enough for anyone; you don't need to be a heroin addict or a performance poet to experience extremity. You just have to love someone.
Source: How to Be Good
“You're mean to me
Why must you be mean to me?
Gee, honey, it seems to me
You love to see me cryin”
Roy Turk (1892–1934) American songwriter
Song Mean to Me http://web.archive.org/web/20030729195250/http://www.thepeaches.com/music/composers/ahlert/MeanToMe.txt