My reading and studying and retellings of old stories didn’t do anything except help me think better. I was at least thoughtful. Too thoughtful, my friends said. And all I thought about was myths and...

Under the ground seep the toxins of the population that lives above. If you have to, you will eat roots and earthworms. It is always night. Candles burn in lanterns made from tin cans. When...

valentinemy friends stitched it up with golden threadlike a redsatin pillow they gave me other whole ones tooroses and charms and red candlesmilagros to repair the real onethey told me i was no longer allowed...

War is being reminded that you are completely at the mercy of death at every moment, without the illusion that you are not. Without the distractions that make life worth living.

But death is stronger than that and when you cover your eyes you are the one who can’t see the dark. The dark still sees you.

If you want to find the trail, if you want to find yourself, you must explore your dreams alone. You must grow at a slow pace in a dark cocoon of loneliness so you can...

Love is a dangerous angel.

You have to make your own family, your own life.

L.A. kills people.’ Jacaranda said. ‘You’re lucky you’re leaving. You’ll be able to write.’She looked paler, going through another depression, smoking in bed in her lilac room. The walls were the color of her veins....

Weetzie could not even cry and make Kleenex roses. She remembered the day her father, Charlie, had driven away in the smashed yellow T-bird, leaving her mother Brandy-Lynn clutching her flowered robe with one hand...

Sometimes she has imagined what it would be like to fly, to live in the river, to run like a horse. She has dreamed of that freedom, that power, and fears the wildness in herself...

Under the pink Harlequin sunglasses strawberry dangling charms, and sugar-frosted eyeshadow she was really almost beautiful.

Each of us has a family tree full of stories inside of us, Dirk thought. Each of us has a story blossoming out of us.

They knew, though, she would not suffer as they had suffered. She was perfect. They were scarred.

It’s important to tell your story. It’s important to listen.

I’d sit around dreaming that the boys I saw at shows or at work – the boys with silver earrings and big boots – would tell me I was beautiful, take me home and feed...

Sometimes she wore Levi’s with white-suede fringe sewn down the legs and a feathered Indian headdress, sometimes old fifties’ taffeta dresses covered with poetry written in glitter, or dresses made of kids’ sheets printed with...

Happiness.” Isnt that cool?

I was starting to learn how to forget the things that made me sad. It was like a charm you followed step-by-step, collecting and blending the ingredients, placing everything in its proper place. It was...

Weetzie could see him–it was a man, a little man in a turban, with a jewel in his nose, harem pants, and curly-toed slippers. “Lanky Lizards!” Weetzie exclaimed.”Greetings,” said the man in an odd voice,...

You always fed strays and bent down to talk to the dogs you met on the street, looking straight into their eyes as if they were old friends. (Maybe they are, you said. From another...

Pianos, unlike people, sing when you give them your every growl. They know how to dive into the pit of your stomach and harmonize with your roars when you’ve split yourself open. And when they...

People worry so much. Just enjoy your body. That you can love. And you’re alive.

I want him to see the flowers in my eyes and hear the songs in my hands.

Magic can be found in stolen moments.

I will go to campus alone dressed in antique silk slips and beat-up cowboy boots and gypsy beads, and I will study poetry. I will sit on the edge of the fountain in the plaza...

When you live in a city with no stars to wish on, you have to wish on each other.

Sylvie wishes the anti-depressants had been around when she was in her early twenties, not only to rescue her from the dark tunnels that came when her brother first got sick, but also to keep...

Think about the word destroy. Do you know what it is? De-story. Destroy. Destory. You see. And restore. That’s re-story. Do you know that only two things have been proven to help survivors of the...

My mother says that pain is hidden in everyone you see. She says try to imagine it like big bunches of flowers that everyone is carrying around with them. Think of your pain like a...

Welcome Beauty, banish fear.

Everyone whirled around her, entranced by the stories in which they recognized themselves, but in the stories they were also more than themselves and it always felt at the end fulfilled, not meaningless and empty...

Sometimes I wanted to peel away all of my skin and find a different me underneath.

When you look at pain as material it makes all the difference in the world. I thought, the pain that is too big to be eased by its use as material would be a pain...

Life was small but good. (15)

This was not a fearie tale. This was not the movies. This was life. It hurt more. It was excruciating. It was excruciatingly beautiful.

He might be faithless but I believe in him.

I wrote poetry from the time I could write. That was the only way I could begin to express who I was but the poems didn’t make sense to my teachers. They didn’t rhyme. They...

Being a good mother is being a hero. Right?

I always wondered what it must be like to lose a twin—if somehow Mary felt it like it was happening to her. If she felt physical pain.

The girl in the mirror wasn’t who I wanted to be and her life wasn’t the one I wanted to have.

Stories are like genies…They can carry us into and though our sorrows. Sometimes they burn, sometimes they dance, sometimes they weep, sometimes they sing. Like genies, everyone has one. Like genies, sometimes we forget that...

You can’t doubt so much, Psyche

I’ll be inside the one who holds you. And then I won’t be.

I stand here waiting. To disappear or sing.

Maybe i would become a mermaid… i would live in the swirling blue-green currents, doing exotic underwater dances for the fish, kissed by sea anemones, caressed by seaweed shawls. I would have a doliphin friend....

Lex surfed wicked, like the devil. He wasn’t afraid of anything, seemed like. He grinned at West as the waves came up toward them like towers of green glass, an emerald city. We’re off to...

You are so intense. Like a storm. It’s shocking how intense you are.

…It felt like they were telling each other secrets. Everything they said felt like that—whispered, tender, full of other meanings, like when you tell someone a dream or talk about your astrological signs as code...

She wasn’t crying at all. This was what scared him the most. Where had she locked up the things he’d seen her feeling that day when she heard? She wasn’t that big a girl to...