The sound of her laughter was sticky as sap, the smell of night-blooming jasmine soft as a milk bath.
A person didn’t need to be beautiful, they just needed to be loved. But I couldn’t help wanting it. If that was the way I could be loved, to be beautiful, I’d take it.
Who can judge another man’s suffering?
Pick a better verb. Most people use twenty verbs to describe everything from a run in their stocking to the explosion of an A-bomb.
My hatred gives me strength.
A book’s flaws make it less predictable.
A cliche is like a coin that has been handled too much. Once language has been overly handled, it no longer leaves a clear imprint.
As a person with terrible handwriting, I love the computer. I’ve waited all my life for the computer.
As an artist, you can never get what you want. What you do never approaches what you want it to be.
Love’s an illusion. It’s a dream you wake up from with an enormous hangover and net credit debt. I’d rather have cash.
And if there is no god? You act as if there is, and it’s the same thing.
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...
Love is a check, that can be forged, that can be cashed. Love is a payment that comes due.
When you started thinking it was easy, you were forgetting what it cost.
I imagined my soul taking in these words like silicated water in the Petrified Forest, turning my wood to patterned agate. I liked it when my mother shaped me this way. I thought clay must feel happy in the good potter’s hand.
Who are you? the band sang. I tried to remember but I really couldn’t say.
A novel is like a dream in which everyone is you. They’re all parts of yourself.
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 your face in a parking lot on the Fourth of July.
What can she possibly teach you, twenty seven names for tears?
The nearest I’d come to feeling anything like God was the plan blue cloudless sky and a certain silence, but how do you pray to that?