Tanith frowned. Did people still go on DATES any more? She was sure they did. They probably called it something different though. She tried to think of the last date she'd been on. The last PROPER date. Did fighting side by side with Saracen Rue count as a date? They ended up snuggling under the moonlight, drenched in gore and pieces of brain - so it had PROBABLY been a date. If it wasn't, it was certainly a fun time had by all. Well, not ALL. But she and Saracen had sure had a blast.

Beware of those who are bored and not passionate about life, for they will bore you with reasons for not living.

To call an artist morbid because he deals with morbidity as his subject-matter is as silly as if one called Shakespeare mad because he wrote ‘King Lear.

There is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it positively refuses to account for are a genuine portion of reality; and they may after all be the best key to life's significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth.

All children are morbid: it's their one saving grace.

The Winter Photograph was my Ariadne, not because it would help me discover a secret thing (monster or treasure), but because it would tell me what constituted that thread which drew me toward Photography. I had understood that henceforth I must interrogate the evidence of Photography, not from the viewpoint of pleasure, but in relation to what we romantically call love and death.

Give the narrative a lighter tone than you think it deserves, dear boy, lighter than you think you can bear to give it," he instructed before I began to write, "because you won't find the truth of life in morbidity, only in hope.

When we define the Photograph as a motionless image, this does not mean only that the figures it represents do not move; it means that they do not (i)emerge(i), do not (i)leave(i): they are anesthetized and fastened down, like butterflies.

We know the original relation of the theater and the cult of the Dead: the first actors separated themselves from the community by playing the role of the Dead: to make oneself up was to designate oneself as a body simultaneously living and dead: the whitened bust of the totemic theater, the man with the painted face in the Chinese theater, the rice-paste makeup of the Indian Katha-Kali, the Japanese No mask ... Now it is this same relation which I find in the Photograph; however 'lifelike' we strive to make it (and this frenzy to be lifelike can only be our mythic denial of an apprehension of death), Photography is a kind of primitive theater, a kind of Tableau Vivant, a figuration of the motionless and made-up face beneath which we see the dead.

I feel that the Photograph creates my body or mortifies it, according to its caprice (apology of this mortiferous power: certain Communards paid with their lives for their willingness or even their eagerness to pose on the barricades: defeated, they were recognized by Thiers's police and shot, almost every one).

Morbidity and Mortality RoundsForgive me, body before me, for this.Forgive me for my bumbling hands, unschooledin how to touch: I meant to understandwhat fever was, not love. Forgive me formy stare, but when I look at you, I seemyself laid bare. Forgive me, body, forwhat seems like calculation when I takea breath before I cut you with my knife,because the cancer has to be removed.Forgive me for not telling you, but I’mno poet. Please forgive me, please. Forgivemy gloves, my callous greeting, my unease—you must not realize I just met deathagain. Forgive me if I say he lookedimpatient. Please, forgive me my despair,which once seemed more like recompense. Forgivemy greed, forgive me for not having moreto give you than this bitter pill. Forgive:for this apology, too late, for thoselike me whose crimes might seem innocuousand yet whose cruelty was obvious.Forgive us for these sins. Forgive me, please,for my confusing heart that sounds so muchlike yours. Forgive me for the night, when Isleep too, beside you under the same moon.Forgive me for my dreams, for my rough knees,for giving up too soon. Forgive me, please,for losing you, unable to forgive.