Quotes from Roman Payne

She is my morning, she is my evening; we have a love that blooms over and again, more beautifully each time than the last. You will see that we are not lovers like others, for whom love is both a punishment and a gift… Our love has never punished, only rewarded. Such love therein lies the eudaimonic life.

She wakes in a puddle of sunlight. Her hands asleep beside her. Her hair draped on the lawn like a mantle of cloth.

A woman must prefer her liberty over a man. To be happy, she must. A man to be happy, however, must yearn for his woman more than his liberty. This is the rightful order.

Who is better off? The one who writes to revel in the voluptuousness of the life that surrounds them? Or the one who writes to escape the tediousness of that which awaits them outside? Whose flame will last longer?

Without knowing why or how, I found myself in love with this strange Wanderess. Maybe I was just in love with the dream she was selling me: a life of destiny and fate; as my own life up until we met had been so void of enchantment. Those things: mystery, fate, enchantment... they are things that young people offer us as soon as we get close to them. And if we're not careful, we can be seduced by, and drawn back into, the youthful world they preside over.

Why do we mortals wonder if it is through 'human chaos' or through 'divine perfection' when the world guides us to some magical event? In either case, is not the result the same? Is the result not 'divine perfection?

To wish a healthy man to die is the wish from a mind of sickness. To wish an ailing man to die is the wish of the ambitious.

I fancied my luck to be witnessing yet another full moon. True, I'd seen hundreds of full moons in my life, but they were not limitless. When one starts thinking of the full moon as a common sight that will come again to one's eyes ad-infinitum, the value of life is diminished and life goes by uncherished. 'This may be my last moon,' I sighed, feeling a sudden sweep of sorrow; and went back to reading more of The Odyssey.

I've seen knives pierce the chest, Children dying in the road Crawling things hooked and baited, Rapists bound and then castrated, Villains singed in public square. Yet none these sights did make me cringe Like when my Love cut all her hair.

Sexual frenzy is our compensation for the tedious moments we must suffer in the passage of life. 'Nothing in excess,' professed the ancient Greeks. Why if I spend half the month in healthy scholarship and pleasant sleep, shouldn't I be allowed the other half to howl at the moon and pillage the groins of Europe's great beauties?

They say Alexander the Great slept with 'The Iliad' beneath his pillow. Though I have never led an army, I am a wanderer. During the waning moon, I cradle Homer's 'Odyssey' as if it were the sweet body of a woman.

There are hours for rest, and hours for wakefulness; nights for sobriety and nights for drunkenness—(if only so that possession of the former allows us to discern the latter when we have it; for sad as it is, no human body can be happily drunk all the time).

The day came when she discovered sex, sensuality, and literature; she said, 'I submit! Let my life be henceforth ruled by poetry. Let me reign as the queen of my dreams until I become nothing less than the heroine of God.

The lot of the bride to be wed before bed desired until rotten. The lot of the author to be read before bed admired then forgotten.

SAUL: 'We made love outdoors, my favorite place to make love, assuming the weather be fair and balmy, and the earth beneath be clean. Our souls intertwined and dripping with sweat.

I've decided the act that cannot wait / is the important will to create / But, ah, if my belly is ignored / the pantry door I shall implore / But I've been known to reach the bed / ideas still famished in my head.

When a Wanderess has been caged, or perched with her wings clipped, She lives like a Stoic, She lives most heroic, smiling with ruby, moistened lips once her cup of Death is welcome sipped.

This was how it was with travel: one city gives you gifts, another robs you. One gives you the heart's affections, the other destroys your soul. Cities and countries are as alive and feeling, as fickle and uncertain as people. Their degrees of love and devotion are as varying as with any human relation. Just as one is good, another is bad.

We all die in the middle of something.

It was a time I slept in many rooms, called myself by many names. I wandered through the quarters of the city like alluvium wanders the river banks. I knew every kind of joy, ascents of every hue. Mine was the twilight and the morning. Mine was a world of rooftops and love songs.

So the nymphs they spoke, we kissed and laid. By noontime's hour our love was made. Like braided chains of crocus stems, we lay entwined, I laid with them. Our breath, one glassy, tideless sea, our bodies draping wearily, we slept, I slept so lucidly, with hopes to stay this memory.

Women are extraordinary creatures!

The youthful body untouched decays the fastest, for no living hands record its splendor; and here youth and time are wasted.

I fear it is my lot, to bide my days in hunchbacked thought, to find what I forgot.