Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver

"Imagine a ruin so strange it must never have happened.
First picture the forest, I want you to be in its conscience, the eyes in the trees. The trees are columns of slick, brindled bark like muscular animals overgrown beyond all reason. Every space is filled with life: delicate, poisonous frogs war-painted like skeletons, clutched in copulation, secreting their precious eggs onto dripping leaves. Vines strangling their own kin in the everlasting wrestle for sunlight. The breathing of monkeys. A glide of snake belly on branch. A single-file army of ants biting a mammoth tree into uniform grains and hauling it back down to the dark for their ravenous queen. And, in reply, a chorus of seedlings arching their necks out of rotted tree stumps, sucking life out of death. The forest eats itself and lives forever."

#211

Desire spurs me on, Love guides and escorts,
Pleasure cajoles me, Habit is my transport;
Hope flatters me and flirts and reaches out
with her right hand to help my weary heart;

the poor fool grasps it and will not be shown
how blind and treacherous is this guide of ours;
the senses are in charge, and reason's dead;
each hot desire's going to breed another.

Virtue and honor, beauty, noble bearing,
and words too sweet have brought me to these branches,
and gently caught my heart upon this birdlime.

In 1327, at precisely
the day's first hour, April 6, I entered
this labyrinth, and I've found no escape.

#93

"How many times love has instructed me;
'Write what you've seen, write it in golden letters,
how I can make my followers change color
and in one moment leave them dead or living.'"

-Petrarch

#86

"I'll always hate the window from which Love
has shot a thousand arrows at me now,
because they haven't killed me, none of them..."

-Petrarch

#85

I've always loved, I go on loving still,
and I'll love even more, day after day,
that sweet place I return to, full of tears
at times when Love comes over me with sadness;

and I am fixed to love the time, the hour,
that took away my base and mundane cares,
most of all she whose lovely face makes me
in love with goodness by her great example,

But who'd have thought these things would so converge,
knocking my heart this way and that, here, there,
all these sweet enemies I love so much?

What force you conquer me today with, Love!
And had not hope grown greater with desire,
I would fall dead where I most want to live.

-Petrarch