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...

I hadn’t understood at the time. If sinners were so unhappy,why would they prefer their suffering? But now I knew why.Without my wounds, who was I? My scars were my face, my pastwas my life.

The phoenix must burn to emerge.

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...

Her hatred glittered irresistibly. I could see it, the jewel, it was sapphire, it was the cold lakes of Norway.

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

I gazed up as if I hadn’t heard, but what I was thinking was, tellme more about the pretty girls. I was embarrassed for wanting it, itwas base, what did pretty matter? I had thought...

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.