Laurie Perez Quotes

I chose to live in the Ether, to be starlight and legend....

I used to think I was in love with Mia because she was in love with me. Now when I watch her strutting down the runway, twisting and flouncing the way her mother trained her, I know she's just a human coat hanger. A wired body I hold late at night and try to fit into.

Now, what’s stirring in this murky sea of complexity and foolishness is an almost suffocating need to breathe fresh history.

The landscape started hard, sharp black mountains over my shoulder and thirsty young saguaros hugging patchy dirt. Gradually it let go, began to green on me a little. I crossed a river, watched succulents get fatter and farmland start to wave, hoarding the blue above and the few clouds it had to spare.I knew the route somehow, knew the curves, the directions, the exact way to go. I knew it the way you know the stars are still up in the sky even though white sun obscures them. Everything that had happened before Lukeville and Sonoita began to liquify in memory, feeling more like fiction than personal history. Funerals and pain, girlfriends and mothers, roommates and priests all tumble away with the desert behind me. The only thing that's real is the road I see ahead. The only person in my life is the man sitting silently beside me. The place I'm going is the only place I've ever wanted to go.

His eyes spark with revolutions, enlightened trickery and unconditional affection.

Crossing the Atlantic on that new day was supposed to be a sharp delineation, a from-now-on demarcation in my life story. What I took off from was not supposed to arrive with me upon landing or ever pulse in me again. From the ocean and sky and the hours in flight, I intended to extract a selective, permanent amnesia.

Feeling compassion toward a dangerous person will not lead you to submit to them or put yourself at risk or condone their actions. What it does simply, is relieve your anxiety – which immediately makes you stronger and more resilient.

A common mistake people make is assuming compassion requires some kind of action they’re not ready to take. In other words, if I feel compassion for this dangerous, havoc-wreaking person (or for my tedious co-workers, the guy who cut me off in traffic, my abusive parents, that politician, etc.) then I’ll have to drop everything I’m into and go hug and try to heal or help...or...do something I don’t know how to do. Not so. Compassion begins within; the compassion you have for yourself will guide you to act or detach with regard for your own well-being.