#payne

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

— Roman Payne

#love #nymph #ode #pastoral #pastorale

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. ↗

— Roman Payne

#clean-earth #love #lovers #making-love #outdoors

After joyfully working each morning, I would leave off around midday to challenge myself to a footrace. Speeding along the sunny paths of the Jardin du Luxembourg, ideas would breed like aphids in my head—for creative invention is easy and sublime when air cycles quickly through the lungs and the body is busy at noble tasks. ↗

— Roman Payne

#health #jardin-du-luxembourg #nobility #noble #paris

This was the first time I thought of S— that day. Her music was beautiful, her voice was beautiful, her body was beautiful. Even the dirty little pads of her feet were beautiful. I cursed myself then. For once, heaven had sent me Beauty in its most perfected form and I abandoned it. She might not have been a girl after all but an angel: a force to guide me on this hazardous path of life I hurry down. How can life be hazardous if it can only end in death? ↗

— Roman Payne

#barcelona #beauty #beauty-is-truth #feminity #girls

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. ↗

— Roman Payne

#ambition #art #artists #creativity #eating

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? ↗

— Roman Payne

#books #escape #flame #heroic #heroism

My Love wakes in a puddle of sunlight. Her hands asleep beside her. Her hair draped on the lawn like a mantle of cloth. I give her my troth, for our love is whole I sing her beauty in my soul ↗

— Roman Payne

#beauty #eden #eve #inspiration #love

Favoring 'resolution' the way we do, it is hard for us men to write great love stories. Why?, because we want to tell too much. We aren’t satisfied unless at the end of the story the characters are lying there, panting. ↗

— Roman Payne

#feminism #fiction #literary-theory #making-love #panting

I'm not ashamed of heroic ambitions. If man and woman can only dance upon this earth for a few countable turns of the sun... let each of us be an Artemis, Odysseus, or Zeus... Aphrodite to the extent of the will of each one. ↗

— Roman Payne

#artemis #dance #dancing #death #life

I sat up in the strange bed fearing it had been a dream, afraid I would never see her again. Not because I wanted anything from her, only her presence. The disappearance of the presence of beauty is the most despairing of events on this time-wheel of ours that rolls onward towards death. ↗

— Roman Payne

#beauty #beauty-in-literature #beauty-in-nature #bed #death