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.

Even her name seemed empty, as though it had detached itself from her and was floating untethered in his mind. How am I supposed to live without you? It was not a matter of the...

I want my own bed, in my own apartment. Home sweet home. No place like home. Take me home, country roads. Home is where the heart is. But my heart is here. So I must...

There is only one page left to write on. I will fill it with words of only one syllable. I love. I have loved. I will love.

And so the twins had remained virgins. Julia and Valentina watched all of their high school and college friends disappear one by one into the adult world of sex, until they were the only people...

He would say her name over and over until it devolved into meaningless sounds – mah REI kuh, mah REI kuh – it became an entry in a dictionary of loneliness.

After my mom died she ate my father up completely. She would have hated it. Every minute of his life since then has been marked by her absence, every action has lacked dimension because she...

We come to a house and walk down the small walkway to its backyard. In the yard there are two screens and a slide projector. People are seated in lawn chairs, watching slides of trees.

The choices we’re working with here are a block universe, where past, present and future all coexist simultaneously and everything has already happened; chaos, where anything can happen and nothing can be predicted because we...

Why do you have a cigarette lighter in your glove compartment?” her husband, Jack, asked her. “I’m bored with knitting. I’ve taken up arson

It’s hard being left behind. (…) It’s hard to be the one who stays.

Martin said, “It feels as though part of my self has detached and gone to Amsterdam, where it—she—is waiting for me. Do you know about phantom-limb syndrome?” Julia nodded. “There’s pain where she ought to...

[Who are the artists you admire, Surrealist or otherwise?]Remedios Varo, Max Ernst, Charlotte Salomon, Goya, Aubrey Beardsley. Beardsley is not so much about the impossible as he is about freaks and deformities, but those are...

But now, I know, how absence can be present, like a damaged nerve, like a dark bird.

I’m living under water. Everything seems slow and far away. I know there’s a world up there, a sunlit quick world where time runs like dry sand through an hourglass, but down here, where I...

But I don’t want to just believe it, I want it to be true.

I told Ing once that she dances like a German and she didn’t like it, but it’s true: she dances seriously, like lives are hanging in the balance, like precision dancing can save the starving...

It’s dark now and I am very tired. I love you, always. Time is nothing.

Dream are different than real life but important too.

I fell asleep. But later that night I woke up. There was moonlight coming through the window, and shadows of tree branches fell onto the bed, waving gently in the breeze.””And then you saw the...

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.