We have no home, she told me. I am your home.
What can I say about life? Do I praise it for letting you live, or damn it for allowing the rest?
No matter how unappealing, each of them imagines he is somehow worthy.
Dawn has a way of casting a pall on any night magic.
We strive for beauty and balance, the sensual over the sentimental.
This is what happens when you fall in love. You’re looking at a natural disaster.
You must find a boy your own age. Someone mild and beautiful to be your lover. Someone who will tremble for your touch, offer you a marguerite by its long stem with his eyes lowered. Someone whose fingers are a poem.
One can bear anything. The pain we cannot bear will kill us outright.
If evil means to be self-motivated, to be the center of one’s own universe, to live on one’s own terms, then every artist, every thinker, every original mind, is evil.
She kissed me on the mouth. Her mouth tasted like iced coffee and cardamom, and I was overwhelmed by the taste, her hot skin and the smell of unwashed hair. I was confused, but not unwilling. I would have let her do anything to me.
She laughed so easily when she was happy. But also when she was sad.
She was a beautiful woman dragging a crippled foot and I was that foot. I was bricks sewn into the hem of her clothes, I was a steel dress.
Although she was giddy with exhaustion, sleep was a lover who refused to be touched...
The expression in her eyes was bitter as nightshade. ‘You ask me about regret? Let me tell you a few things about regret, my darling. There is no end to it. You cannot find the beginning of the chain that brought us from there to here. Should you regret the whole chain, and the air between, or each link separately, as if you could uncouple them? Do you regret the beginning which ended so badly, or just the ending itself? I’ve given more thought to this question than you can begin to imagine.
They wanted the real mother, the blood mother, the great womb, mother of fierce compassion, a woman large enough to hold all the pain, to carry it away. What we needed was someone who bled... mother’s big enough, wide enough for us to hide in... mother’s who would breathe for us when we could not breathe anymore, who would fight for us, who would kill for us, die for us.
I imagined Kandinsky’s mind, spread out all over the world, and then gathered together. Everyone having only a piece of the puzzle. Only in a show like this could you see the complete picture, stack the pieces up, hold them to the light, see how it all fit together. It made me hopeful, like someday my life would make sense too, if I could just hold all the pieces together at the same time.
But that was the thing about zero. Its weakness. Even if zero had taken over the entire universe, the biggest fascist of all, one tiny gesture could deny it. One footprint, one atom. You didn’t have to be a genius. You didn’t even have to know that was what you were doing. You made a mark. You changed something. It said, “A human being passed here.” And changed zero to one.
I tried on Claire’s double strand of pearls in the mirror, ran the smooth, lustrous beads through my fingers, touched the coral rose of the clasp. 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 that even if something broke, the whole thing wouldn’t come apart.
And in one drawer, twenty-seven names for tears. Heartdew. Griefhoney. Sadwater. Die Tranen. Eau de douleur. Los rios del corazon.
If you expect to find people who will understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment. 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.