Chaos is more freedom; in fact, total freedom. But no meaning. I want to be free to act, and I also want my actions to mean something.

He was not in the house. He did not come back that night. Days went by, and at last she understood that he would not return at all.

. . .Tell me, Clare: why on earth would a lovely girl like you want to marry Henry?’Everything in the room seems to hold its breath. Henry stiffens but doesn’t say anything. I lean forward...

Long ago, men went to sea, and women waited for them, standing on the edge of the water, scanning the horizon for the tiny ship. Now I wait for Henry. He vanishes unwillingly, without warning....

Why is love intensified by absence?

That’s the thing about living vicariously; it’s so much faster than actual living.

…and I suddenly feel that Henry is there, incredible need for Henry to be there and to put his hand on me even while it seems to me that Henry is the rain and I...

He said something interesting: he said that he thinks there is only free will when you are in time, in the present. He says in the past we can only do what we did, and...

The Garden Under Snow “Now the garden is under snow a blank page our footprints write onclare who was never minebut always belonged to herselfSleeping Beautya crystalline blanketthis is her springthis is her sleeping/awakeningshe is...

The hardest lesson is Clare’s solitude. Sometimes I come home and Clare seems kind of irritated; I’ve interrupted some train of thought, broken into the dreary silence of her day. Sometimes I see an expression...

Love the world and yourself in it, move through it as though it offers no resistance, as though the world is your natural element.

I go to sleep alone, and wake up alone. I take walks. I work until I’m tired. I watch the wind play with the trash that’s been under the snow all winter. Everything seems simple...

Wanting to please, worrying that she will see me as I really am. But wanting to be known. That is…you’re naked, moaning in the dark, no dignity at all…I wanted her to see me and...

one of the best and the most painful things about time traveling has been the opportunity to see my mother alive.

Sleep is my lover now, my forgetting, my opiate, my oblivion.

When we were that young we invented the world, no one could tell us a thing.

When I am out there, in time, I am inverted, changed into a desperate version of myself. I become a thief, a vagrant, an animal who runs and hides. I startle old women and amaze...

Right now we are here, and nothing can mar our perfection, or steal the joy of this perfect moment.

Now I wonder if it means that the future is a place, or like a place, that I could go to; that is go to in some way otherthan just getting older.

I sit quietly and think about my mom. It’s funny how memory erodes, If all I had to work from were my childhood memories, my knowledge of my mother would be faded and soft, with...

I breathe slowly and deeply. I make my eyes still under eyelids, I make my mind still, and soon, Sleep, seeing a perfect reproduction of himself, comes to be united with his facsimile.

I am afraid of the future; it seems to be a big box waiting for me.

I raise my head and see a red illuminated EXIT sign and as my eyes adjust I see tigers, cavemen with long spears, cavewomen wearing strategically modest skins, wolfish dogs. My heart is racing and...

Clare, I want to tell you, again, I love you. Our love has been the thread through the labyrinth, the net under the high-wire walker, the only real thing in this strange life of mine...

Knowing the future is different from being told what I like.

We are often insane with happiness. We are also very unhappy for reasons neither of us can do anything about. Like being separated.

I sleep all day. Noises flit around the house- garbage truck in the alley, rain, tree rapping against the bedroom window. I sleep. I inhabit sleep firmly, willing it, wielding it, pushing away dreams, refusing,...

The compelling thing about making art—or making anything, I suppose—is the moment when the vaporous, insubstantial idea becomes a solid there, a thing, a substance in a world of substances. Circe, Nimbue, Artemis, Athena, all...

When I began writing The Night Bookmobile, it was a story about a woman’s secret life as a reader. As I worked it also became a story about the claims that books place on their...

Don’t you think it’s better to be extremely happy for a short while, even if you lose it, than to be just okay for your whole life?

That is what madness is, isn’t it? All the wheels fly off the bus and things don’t make sense any more. Or rather, they do, but it’s not a kind of sense anyone else can...

I think about my mother singing after lunch on a Summer afternoon, twirling in blue dress across the floor of her dressing room

I make books because I love them as objects; because I want to put the pictures and the words together, because I want to tell a story.

Mama said, “Dreams are different to real life but important too.

Chicago has so much excellent architecture that they feel obliged to tear some of it down now and then and erect terrible buildings just to help us all appreciate the good stuff.

I am suddenly comsumed by nostalgia for the little girl who was me, who loved the fields and believed in God, who spent winter days home sick from school reading Nancy Drew and sucking menthol...

To world enough and time.

You can still be cool when you’re dead. In fact, it’s much easier, because you aren’t getting old and fat and losing your hair.

I love you always. Time is nothing.

Each spine was an encapsulated memory, each book represented hours, days of pleasure, of immersion into words.

The only thing we can do is to say ‘Fuck it’ over and over again, really loud, until someone stops us.

There are several ways to react to being lost. One is to panic: this was usually Valentina’s first impulse. Another is to abandon yourself to lostness, to allow the fact that you’ve misplaced yourself to...

I never understood why Clark Kent was so hell bent on keeping Lois Lane in the dark.

…all of our laments could not add a single second to her life, not one additional beat of the heart, nor a breath.

Think for a minute, darling: in fairy tales it’s always the children who have the fine adventures. The mothers have to stay at home and wait for the children to fly in the window.

I won’t ever leave you, even though you’re always leaving me.

When the woman you live with is an artist, every day is a surprise. Clare has turned the second bedroom into a wonder cabinet, full of small sculptures and drawings pinned up on every inch...

I don’t know what to say to this Clare who is old and young and different from other girls, who knows that different might be hard.

Our love has been the thread through thelabyrinth, the net under the high-wire walker, the only real thing in this strange life of mine that I could ever trust.

You’re my phantom limb, Mouse. I keep looking for you. I forget. I feel stupid, Mouse. Haunt me, find me, come back from wherever you are. Be with me.