It was as if I was blind and she’d told me, sight doesn’t matter, it’s just as well you can’t see.
The cake had a trick candle that wouldn’t go out, so I didn’t get my wish. Which was just that it would always be like this, that my life could be a party just for me.
Find someone who will tremble for your touch, someone whose fingers are a poem.
A cliche is everything you’ve ever heard of.
Memory is the fourth dimension to any landscape.
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.
Take my advice. Stay away from all broken people.
Don’t hoard the past. Don’t cherish anything. Burn it. The artist is the phoenix who burns to emerge.
The Santa Anas blew in hot from the desert, shriveling the last of the spring grass into whiskers of pale straw. Only the oleanders thrived, their delicate poisonous blooms, their dagger green leaves. We could not sleep in the hot dry nights, my mother and I.
After all the fears, the warnings, after all, a woman’s mistakes are different from a girl’s. They are written by fire on stone. They are a trait and not an error.
I felt like time was a great sea, and I was floating on the back of a turtle, and no sails broke the horizon.
Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow.
What is real is always worth it.
For she is my love, and other women are but big bodies of flame.
At every moment, each instrument knew what to play. Its little bit. But none could see the whole thing like this, all at once, only its own part. Just like life. Each person was like a line of music, but nobody knew what the symphony sounded like. Only the conductor had the whole score.
Panic was the worst thing. When you panicked, you couldn’t see possibilities. Then came despair.
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 could start again every time.
The stupid things you say in the rain, that can’t ever be washed away.
And I thought, there was no God, there was only what you wanted.
The best you’ll ever do is to understand yourself, know what it is that you want, and not let the cattle stand in your way.