The moon rose, squatting in the strained blue.

The way Starr felt in church, that’s how I felt at the art museum, both safe and elevated.

In a perverse way, I was glad for the stitches, glad it would show, that there would be scars. What was the point in just being hurt on the inside? It should bloody well show.

That was the thing about words, they were clear and specific–chair, eye, stone–but when you talked about feelings, words were too stiff, they were this and not that, they couldn’t include all the meanings. In...

I was always mortified.Didn’t they know they were tying thier mothers to the ground? Weren’t chains ashamed of their prisoners?

What can I say about life? Do I praise it for letting you live, or damn it for allowing the rest?

This was how girls left. They packed up their suitcases and walked away in high heels. They pretended they weren’t crying, that it wasn’t the worst day of their lives.

I took the volume to a table, opened its soft, ivory pages… and fell into it as into a pool during dry season.

Although she was giddy with exhaustion, sleep was a lover who refused to be touched….

The question of good and the nature of evil will always be one of philosophy’s most intriguing problems, up there with the problem of existence itself. If evil means to be self-motivated, to be the...

Now I wish she’d never broken any of her rules. I understood why she held to them so hard. Once you broke the first one, they all broke, one by one, like firecrackers exploding in...

A cliche is everything you’ve ever heard of.

I imagined the lies the valedictorian was telling them right now. About the exciting future that lies ahead. I wish she’d tell them the truth: Half of you have gone as far in life as...

Who are you? the band sang. I tried to remember but I really couldn’t say.

What was beauty unless you intended to use it, like a hammer, or a key? It was just something for other people to use and admire, or envy, despise. To nail their dreams onto like...

A womans mistakes are different from a girls

They dream of men with gentle hands, eloquent with tenderness, fingers that brushed along a cheek, that outlined open lips in the lovers’ braille. Hands that sculpted sweetness from sullen flesh, that traced breast and...

Marvel hates her because she’s pretty and doesn’t have any kids to worry about.

A novel is like a dream in which everyone is you. They’re all parts of yourself.

She’s never where she is,’ I said. ‘She’s only inside her head.

Her fingers moved among barnacles and mussels, blue-black, sharp-edged. Neon red starfish were limp Dalis on the rocks, surrounded by bouquets of stinging anemones and purple bursts of spiny sea urchins.

beautiful girls have certain advantages.

For lunch, we drove into the hills and parked in the dappled shade of a big sycamore, its powdery white bark like a woman’s body against the uncanny blue sky.

Isn’t it funny.I’m enjoying my hatred so much more than i ever enjoyed love. Love is temperamental. Tiring. It makes demands. Love uses you, changes its mind. But hatred, now, that’s something you can use....

don’t sulk. you’re acting just like a man.

The pearls weren’t really white, they were a warm oyster beige, with little knots in between so if they broke, you only lost one. I wished my life could be like that, knotted up so...

Remember…we don’t see objects, we see light. […] Light can do anything water can do–flow, wash, trickle. It can do anything an artist can do–paint, burnish, carve. Candlelight falls, licks a face. There is always...

Someday I would have lovers and write a poem after

She would be half a planet away, floating in a turquoise sea, dancing by moonlight to flamenco guitar.

Do you ever want to go home?’ I asked Paul.He brushed an ash from my face. ‘It’s the century of the displaced person,’ he said. ‘You can never go home.

Whenever she turned her steep focus to me, I felt the warmth that flowers must feel when they bloom through the snow, under the first concentrated rays of the sun.

Men… No matter how unappealing, each of them imagines he is somehow worthy.

I wanted to freeze this moment forever, the chimes, the slight splash of the water, the chink of the dogs’ leashes, laughter from the pool, the skritch of my mother’s dip-pen, the smell of the...

I decided that if I was never going to sell anything as long as I lived, I might as well do what I want to do ’cause then at least I would’ve done what I...

For what is writing besides capturing thoughts that belong to all of us, so that we can recognize ourselves, undestand ourselves, and perhaps, each other. Every thoughtful book about love makes us better lovers, I...

Rena noticed me watching it pass. ‘You think they don’t got problem?’ Rena said. ‘Everybody got problem. You got me, they got insurance, house payment, Preparation H.’ She smiled, baring the part between her two...

You were my home, Mother. I had no home but you

Don’t turn over the rocks if you don’t want to see the pale creatures who live under them.

I almost said, you’re not broken, you’re just going through something. But I couldn’t. She knew. There was something terribly wrong with her, all the way inside. She was like a big diamond with a...

His voice was cloves and nightingales, it took us to spice markets in the Celebs, we drifted with him on a houseboat beyond the Coral Sea. We were like cobras following a reed flute.

Always learn poems by heart. They have to become the marrow in your bones. Like fluoride in the water, they’ll make your soul impervious to the world’s soft decay.

Love humiliates you, hatred cradles you.

I know what you are learning to endure. There is nothing to be done. Make sure nothing is wasted. Take notes. Remember it all, every insult, every tear. Tattoo it on the inside of your...

The expression in her eyes was bitter as nightshade. ‘You ask me about regret? Let me tell you a few things about regret, my darling. There is no end to it. You cannot find the...

But then I realized, they weren’t calling out for their own mothers. Not those weak women, those victims. Drug addicts, shopaholics, cookie bakers. They didn’t mean the women who let them down, who failed to...

I wanted to tell her not to entertain despair like this. Despair wasn’t a guest, you didn’t play its favourite music, find it a comfortable chair. Despair was the enemy.

I thought of my mother as Queen Christina, cool and sad, eyes trained on some distant horizon. That was where she belonged, in furs and palaces of rare treasures, fireplaces large enough to roast a...

Always learn poems by heart,’ she said. ‘They have to become the marrow in your bones. Like fluoride in the water, they’ll make your soul impervious to the world’s soft decay.

You must find a boy your own age. Someone mild and beautiful to be your lover. Someone who will tremble for your touch, offer you a marguerite by its long stem with his eyes lowered....

I couldn’t stop thinking about the body, what a hard fact it was.That philosopher who said we think, therefore we are, should havespent an hour in the maternity ward of Waite Memorial Hospital. He’dhave had...