The moon rose, squatting in the strained blue.

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.

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

God is dead, haven’t you heard, he died a hundred years ago, gave outfrom sheer lack of interest, decided to play golf instead.

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...

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...

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...