I know what you are learning to endure. There is nothing to be done. Make sure nothing is wasted. Take notes. Remember it all, every insult, every tear. Tattoo it on the inside of your mind. In life, knowledge of poisons is essential. I’ve told you, nobody becomes an artist unless they have to.
The damned could be saved, he said, anytime. But they refused to give up their sins. Though they suffered endlessly, they would not give them up, even for salvation, perfect divine love.
In stages, that’s how. First you let go of the things you loved.
We stared out at the city that hummed and glittered like a computer chip deep in some unknowable machine, holding its secret like a poker hand.
They can’t touch us. We’re the Vikings. We go into battle without armor for the flush and the blood of it.
Crows squawked raucously in the trees. It sounded like they were tearing something apart, something they didn’t even want, just for the fun of destroying it.
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 Hatred cradles you.
This ragged heart,” she said, pulling at her kimono. “I should rip it out and bury it for compost.
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.