I used to think marriage was a plate-glass window just begging for a brick.
Unconditional love is what a child should expect from a parent even though it rarely works out that way.
We heal up through being loved, and through loving others. We don’t heal by forming a secret society of one – by assessing about the only other ‘one’ we might admit, and being doomed to disappointment.
I don’t want to conquer you; I just want to climb you.
Organized religion is a very bad way of passing on spiritual values because it becomes so corrupted with political and repressive agendas which don’t help anybody to develop their spirituality.
I don’t own my emotions unless I can think about them. I am not afraid of feeling but I am afraid of feeling unthinkingly. I don’t want to drown. My head is my heart’s lifebelt.
Sometimes you have to live in precarious and temporary places. Unsuitable places. Wrong places. Sometimes the safe place won’t help you.
The fact is that every atom that we’re made of is part of that first explosion of a nuclear star billions of years ago. We’re connected to the entire universe.
August. We were arguing. You want love to be like this every day don’t you? 92 degrees even in the shade.
By betrayal, I mean promising to be on your side, then being on somebody else’s.
I don’t want to eke out my life like a resource in short supply. The only selfish life is a timid one. To hold back, to withdraw, to keep the best in reserve, both overvalues the self, and undervalues what the self is.
Memory loss is one way of coping with damage.
I am much better at saying how I feel when I no longer feel it.
You’ve got these twenty million people who call themselves the Evangelical Christians who will put their hand up and say, I believe in the devil, I’m against abortion and gay rights, and we have to blow up the world. It’s frightening.
She was fragile, gentle, wide awake in a sleeping world.
And you? Now that I have discovered you? Beautiful, dangerous, unleashed. Still I try to hold you, knowing that your body is faced with knives.
There’s something about the authenticity rather than the autobiography that makes my story and my pain move across and become your story and your pain.
I have noticed that doing the sensible thing is only a good idea when the decision is quite small. For the life-changing things, you must risk it.
When pieces of work speak to us in a way that feels as if they were made just for us, those become our private worlds that we return to.
We are all historians in our small way.