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