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?
You were my home, Mother. I had no home but you.
I’ve been depressed many times in my life. But under it all I’m an optimist.
Poppies bleed petals of sheer excess. You and I, this sweet battle ground.
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.
He hated crowds, never liked punk. He couldn’t handle the nakedness of the rage -his own so sophisticated and finely tuned. He could never see the similarity between himself and Donnie Draino screaming into a mic.
No matter where I was, my compass pointed west. I would always know what time it was in California.
How many people ask you to come share their life?
A fish has no concept of water.
I thought clay must feel happy in the good potter’s hand.
I thought of my mother as Queen Christina, cool and sad, eyes trained on some distant horizon. That was where she belonged, in furs and palaces of rare treasures, fireplaces large enough to roast a reindeer, ships of Swedish maple.
I closed my eyes to watch tiny dancers like jeweled birds cross the dark screen of my eyelids.
Her hatred glittered irresistibly. I could see it, the jewel, it was sapphire, it was the cold lakes of Norway.