“One of the things I love about Kate Bush is her absolute ability to take things, to pluck things that you would never expect to see on a rock album, and put them there and make them work. James Joyce's Ulysses — one of the greatest passages in all of English or Anglo-Irish literature, is Molly Bloom's glorious soliloquy ending in a sequence of Yeses. It's about embracing the world of the senses, embracing yourself, embracing sex, embracing love, embracing the future, embracing all possibility, and it goes all the way back to me, to "Wuthering Heights" — this is somebody who is not afraid of books. This is somebody who is not afraid of reading, somebody who's not afraid of writers, and who's not afraid of translating, being an intermediary, being a door, between the world of books and the world of rock.”

Canto XVI, stanza 15 (tr. Fairfax)
Compare:
Gather the Rose of Love, whilst yet is time,
Whilst loving thou mayst loved be with equal crime.
Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, B. II, C. XII, st. 75
Gather ye rosebuds while ye may.
Robert Herrick, "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time"
Gerusalemme Liberata (1581)

Beim Wort genommen (1955); as translated by Harry Zohn

Lady Gaga Gives CNN Her Unique Recipe for Success http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFGchzvu41k
Context: That’s the most Warholian thing about what I do... I embrace pop culture. The very thing that everybody says is poisonous and ostentatious and shallow, it’s like my chemistry book... and I make what I believe to be art out of it.

Jane Hirshfield, ed., Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women.
The Mengeldichten (Poems in Couplets) 25-29

Bodhi Tree lecture (1999)
Context: The Goddess religion asserts that the earth is alive, and that everything on the earth is part of a living being. We believe that you can celebrate life in many different images and forms, that life moves in cycles of birth and growth and death and rebirth, and that the same spirit moves through nature, through the cycles of the seasons, through the birth and growth and death of plants and animals, and through our lives as human beings. There is a multiplicity of images that you can draw upon for understanding and power, but the reason we focus on the goddess is partly to counterbalance the 5,000 years worth of focus on male holy images, and partly to affirm that bringing life into the world is sacred. Our goal is not to get out of the world or to get out of life, but to integrate it, to celebrate it, to embrace it fully, and to embrace all the different cycles within it

"And God Smiles," sermon preached at All Saints Church, Pasadena, California (6 November 2005)
Context: This family has no outsiders. Everyone is an insider. When Jesus said, "I, if I am lifted up, will draw..." Did he say, "I will draw some"? "I will draw some, and tough luck for the others"? He said, "I, if I be lifted up, will draw all." All! All! All! – Black, white, yellow; rich, poor; clever, not so clever; beautiful, not so beautiful. All! All! It is radical. All! Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, Bush – all! All! All are to be held in this incredible embrace. Gay, lesbian, so-called "straight;" all! All! All are to be held in the incredible embrace of the love that won’t let us go.