A place mostly to gather quotes and other things that inspire me - be they from poetry, books on religion/theology, or whatever - to draw on as a resource in ministry.
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...Recently on a hike, my friend asked after My Life as a Drooping Lily (Mary W. again), meaning, why do I persist in such glad self-liberation, and I said, I want to be able to talk to people without having to fuck or be fucked, yeah?.... ....and I had stumped her because that's all--the entire revolution so painfully simple-- yet I refuse the lonely retreat, to be swallowed by true crime podcasts and a day-drunk pinot, though the hag-hairs on my chin do blossom....
from "Forms and materials" in No Spare People by Erin Hoover, p. 76,
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...Whispers suggest I'm a casualty of women's lib, my girlhood a die to keep casting. A perfect circle is hard to imagine (except if you have imagination), but it's obvious: my daughter and I are complete by ourselves. She is all capacity, a bespoke miracle that learns easily, as I once did....
from "Forms and materials" in No Spare People by Erin Hoover, p. 75
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...Give me an acceptable love, not for everyone, but morphed to me.
from "Forms and materials" in No Spare People by Erin Hoover, p. 73
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...Said another mother I know who'd had IVF: How ironic to pay a cryobank. I've had sperm in my bed, on my t-shirt, in my hair, everywhere . . . sperm, sperm, sperm. There is too much sperm in America, America is run by sperm, but the vial I bought sprung me from the Romance-Industrial Complex that kept me docile for many years, and as an exit fee, it worked.
from "Forms and materials" in No Spare People by Erin Hoover, p. 73
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...Back then, I thought the only people who understood 'friend' as I did were long-gone religious sects, Mennonites in cloisters or the Shakers channeling lust into labor, turning out sweaters, rocking chairs.... For decades I argued with would-be and former lovers but I always gave them (mostly him) what they wanted. I gave a kiss. A layover in Saint Louis...
from "Forms and materials" in No Spare People by Erin Hoover, p. 68-69
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...I want to be rebellious in a way nobody ever sang about. I desire a removal of every language I do not mean to speak from my person, every other person out of my body, out of my blood and lungs and bile, the limbs I thought worthless, though in middle age I find them worth a fortune. They really are, although I reject the language of value, too. You cannot commerce me... ...It took me twenty years but I stopped glistening. I put the velvet away, the doe voice, the shiny symetry under which I was dying. Correction: I am getting closer to dying all the time. I am getting closer to mapping myself as more than a territory to capture, stuffed head for the hunter to hang....
from "In middle age, at last I understand" in No Spare People by Erin Hoover, p. 63-64
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...Everyone around me exhibits bravery, if it's brave to Instagram your child's school project during the pandemic death parade. I'm embarrassed I once asked why the subjects of mad kings didn't rise up, what it meant to nail parchment to a church door. Each day I realize anew how elastic the mind is. I keep stretching and stretching mine, repetitive motions like milking an udder or pulling cloth through a machine, actions that kept my ancestors alive. One day my mind will be large enough to explain this to my daughter...
from "Death parade" in No Spare People by Erin Hoover, p. 60
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...I have marched to no effect, and all my calls to Congress die in voicemail. I'm afraid as I watch our television, as I consider figurations of power: is power crushingly hard, or shapeshifting so as to appear harmless? Which? I do not understand it. No one smart has come up with much of anything and anyway, the day draws me back-- our dryer broken, and my tire flat, and her sick. On our last day of the decade I knead my girl's shoulders as she cries into me and I tell her to go again, get it out. Get that sick out.
from "On this, our last day of the decade" in No Spare People by Erin Hoover, p. 56-67
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...More than that, it's been years since I talked to someone I called a neighbor, said anything more than rugrat homilies or regurgitated the temperature forecast. Whatever the real Arkansas is, I've missed it. As I know to do, I talk to the women about our children, but not ever to their husbands, fork a dog into a bun and squeeze a line of ketchup into its abiding valley... ...I compliment the tea for being sweet, the dogs for being big, the people for their kind invitation...
from "Real Arkansas" in No Spare People by Erin Hoover, p. 51-52
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...An embarrassing number touched me but I see now how few have loved me only considered me curious....
from "Proof of impossibility" in No Spare People by Erin Hoover, p. 48
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...The mother made finite, while inside her exists any and all unknowns, the birth of her child its own terrific event horizon. Soon it will be over. Let whatever comes, come. Let this rift never close.
from "Maternity exhibit as the singularity" in No Spare People by Erin Hoover, p. 47
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...The Northern states are self-satisfied, segregated too, but here I am whiter, a white weapon to be wielded, a pliant, powerful fool. I've never been so queer as I am in the South, where we're taught to call a scrape of cells 'baby, pre-born,' like cake mix or powder cement.... ...Like water, men are everywhere, and I am a vessel unmatched, unmarried, a chamber to be eyed. Some Northern men would like to handle me, too, but for now I moderate my voice and when I get a ma'am I nod my princess nod... ...I say the only words safe for me to say, thank you, beg your pardon, I lilt them like charms as I search for my way out.
from "White woman" in No Spare People by Erin Hoover, p. 43-44
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...Some watched the news for years straight. Some became the news, swallowing whole its desolation in cyclical packages of footage, learning to frame the fracture in their own lives as reportage. I posted volumes of stupid shit. Agents of the state murdered George Floyd, and I resented what I had, my disinfected echo chamber, this performance layered over the dead. There's a record of what I did, days timestamped by email. How I tried. I built pedagogy workshops as my students gave up entirely on school. I drove to the border of my dry county and bought a handle of vodka, drank to blur my vision. I wanted to be as useless as a governor... In the bathroom mirror, I made outsized vows to become necessary. I swore, again, to be good.
from "My generation is not lost but we are losing" in No Spare People by Erin Hoover, p. 37
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"I pray because
I can鈥檛 bend social orders
let alone my own diminutive life
to my will, and I have bent so hard
that I broke myself, on protest
and on that most ethereal of wishes,
the vote."
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...When technology dulls a problem, it isn't a problem. 'I've never seen a prescription like yours, har-de-har-har!' People imagine I'm curious, squinting at hello, leaning in as if to kiss the document in my hands. A doctor once diagnosed me as 'clumsy,' not a medical condition but a scold....You learn to feel your way: a page of text, a conversation, a city, a museum of impressionist paintings. I'm more attentive to shifts in shadow and light than I used to be...
from "If I wear glasses, will you be able to see me?" in No Spare People by Erin Hoover, p. 24
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....The terrors of years ago have quit offering useful advice. When I was a kid, everyone talked about Love Canal as a toxic dumping round, or radiation from Three Mile Island, and today no one talks about either. ** Now the coronavirus has arrived. It was always going to arrive; it was predicted, like 9/11. ** A parade is a string of symbols, but a parade is also a display of power, prosperity, or the national mood, the definition of each being a matter of control. ... ** People didn't have kids after 9/11, and so there are fewer adults of college age today. This is one of the facts distressing my field, higher education. The pandemic is another. At first the pandemic was all of the things we couldn't have. Then it just was. A cough was a harbinger of death. Then, it was a cough. I phoned friends still living in New York, losing their minds for any reason besides the cold-storage morgue trucks parked outside the hospital. She didn't do the dishes. She left out the margarine. On the news, a commentator called the numbers on our screen, the uptick in fatalities, a death parade. I live in one of the states that didn't close down. I got on videochat with a local friend who had the virus, delirious, rasping that she'd see me soon. She was the one struggling, but I couldn't stand to look at her pretend everything was all right. Her sunken posture in the recliner and the fever shining through her skin, that is inside me now. Will I keep it? ** It is tempting to want always to reduce the thing to its detail. To make it small. That morning I wore heels, and because I had to walk forty blocks that day, I no longer wear them, I said for the first time a year after 9/11 at an event commemorating the cataclysm. I don't remember the walk home at all, but I would say it again and again.
from "Death parade" in No Spare People by Erin Hoover, p. 21-23
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...I can tell you where I was in that thin cut of time when like you I didn't belong to anyone....
from "Three weeks" in No Spare People by Erin Hoover, p. 17
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