A war changes people in a number of ways. It either shortcuts you to your very self; or it triggers such variations that you might as well have been a larva, pupating in dampness, darkness...

Everything in New York is a photograph. All the things that are supposed to be dirty or rough or unrefined are the most beautiful things. Garbage cans at the ends of alleyways look like they’ve...

Afterwards, in bed with a book, the spell of television feels remote compared to the journey into the page. To be in a book. To slip into the crease where two pages meet, to live...

She’s no lady. Her songs are all unbelievably unhappy or lewd. It’s called Blues. She sings about sore feet, sexual relations, baked goods, killing your lover, being broke, men called Daddy, women who dress like...

…dread invades the living room, finds her on the couch, presses on her, gets inside her where it swiftly grows bigger than she is until she is inside it, looking out from a rind of...

Adelaide believes that all children should have enough grown-ups around who love them so that one can tell them to fight, one can tell them not to, and one can tell them not to worry...

Tell the story, gather the events, repeat them. Pattern is a matter of upkeep. Otherwise the weave relaxes back to threads picked up by birds to make their nests. Repeat, or the story will fall...

Do you think there’s such a thing as a ghost who masquerades as a person? Do you believe that there are people whose bodies are still alive here on earth but whose souls are already...

I am burning. I have to live, I have to sing, I want to transform myself into a thousand different characters and carry their life with me onto the stage where it’s so bright and...

My first advantage: I have everything. My second advantage: this is just another island. My third advantage: I am bigger than it all.

It’s important to attend funerals. It is important to view the body, they say, and to see it committed to earth or fire because unless you do that, the loved one dies for you again...

She learns a valuable lesson: if you think you are good, just try doing good. You’ll soon find out how inadequate your little drop of goodness is.

To believe and yet to have no hope is to thirst beside a fountain.

The world should not be organized to require heroines, and when one is required but fails to appear we should not judge. We should just say, poor Camille, she turned into a bitch the way...