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

The moon rose, squatting in the strained blue.

Loneliness ia a human condition

Love humiliates you, hatred cradles you.

Who am I? I am who I say I am and tomorrow someone else entirely. You are too nostalgic, you want memory to secure you, console you. The past is a bore. What matters is only oneself and what one creates from what one has learned. Imagination uses what it needs and discards the rest—...

Nobody had forgotten anything here. In Berlin, you had to wrestle with the past, you had to build on the ruins, inside them. It wasn’t like America where we scraped the earth clean, thinking we could start again every time.

And if there is no god?You act as if there is, and it’s the same thing.

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 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 dead spot in the middle. I was supposed to breathe life into that dead spot, but it hadn’t worked.

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.

Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow. Never expect to outgrow loneliness. Never hope to find people who will understand you, someone to fill that space. If you expect to find people who will understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment.

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. Sculpt. Wield. It’s hard, or soft, however you need it. Love humiliates you, but Hatred cradles you.

A cliche is everything you’ve ever heard of.

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.

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.

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

What’s real is always worth it,’ she explained to me. ‘Look how it’s made.’ She showed me the shoulders, the way they were knit together with a separate yoke instead of a seam. ‘You’ll wear it your whole life.

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.

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

beautiful girls have certain advantages.

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 picture hanger on a blank wall. And so many girls saying, use me, dream me.

I thought clay must feel happy in the good potter’s hand.

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

Someday I would have lovers and write a poem after

The cake had a trick candle that wouldn’t go out, so I didn’t get my wish. Which was just that it would always be like this, that my life could be a party just for me.

Love is temperamental. Tiring. It makes demands. Love uses you, changes its mind. But hatred, now, that’s something you can use. Sculpt. Wield. It’s hard, or soft, however you need it. Love humiliates you, but Hatred cradles you.

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.

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

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

I couldn’t imagine owning beauty like my mothers. I wouldn’t dare.

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 wanted to do in life. What’s that worth?

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

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

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 you’re ever going to. Look around. It’s all downhill from here. The rest of us will go a bit further,...

She laughed so easily when she was happy. But also when she was sad.

She took a life because someonehumiliated her, hurt her image of herself as the Valkyrie, thestainless warrior. Exposed her weakness, which was only love. So sheavenged herself. So easy to justify, I wrote to her. It’s because youfelt like a victim you did it. If you were really strong, you couldhave tolerated the humiliation.

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

Isn’t it funny. I’m enjoying my hatred so much more than I ever enjoyed love. Love is tempermental. Tiring. It makes demands. Love uses you. Changes its mind….. But hatred, now. That’s something you can use. Sculpt. Wield. It’s hard or soft, however you need it. Love humiliates you, but hatred cradels you. It’s so...

Let me tell you a few things about regret, my darling. There is no end to it. You cannot find the beginning of the chain that brought us from there to here. Should you regret the whole chain, and the air in between, or each link separately?

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

A womans mistakes are different from a girls

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

I hated labels anyway. People didn’t fit in slots–prostitute, housewife, saint–like sorting the mail. We were so mutable, fluid with fear and desire, ideals and angles, changeable as water.

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 mind. In life, knowledge of poisons is essential. I’ve told you, nobody becomes an artist unless they have to.

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 ignited hips, opening, kneading. Flesh becomes bread in the heat of those hands, braided and rising.

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 center of one’s own universe, to live on one’s own terms, then every artist, thinker, every original mind, is evil....

I hated labels anyway. People didn’t fit in slots—prostitute, housewife, saint—like sorting the mail. We were so mutable, fluid with fear and desire, ideals and angles, changeable as water.

The phoenix must burn to emerge.

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

Oleander time, she said. Lovers who kill each other now will blame it on the wind.