Every novelist should possess a hermaphroditic imagination.
We’re all made up of many parts, other halves. Not just me.
Emotions, in my experience, aren’t covered by single words. I don’t believe in “sadness”, “joy”, or “regret”. Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that is oversimplifies feeling. I’d like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions.
On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide- it was Mary this time, and sleeping pills, like Therese- the two paramedics arrived at the house knowing exactly where the knife drawer was, and the gas oven, and the beam in the basement from which it was possible to tie a rope.
The Statue of Liberty’s gender changed nothing. It was the same here as anywhere: men and their wars.
A changeableness, too, as if beneath my visible face there was another, having second thoughts.
But what humans forget, cells remember. The body, that elephant.
If you talk to geneticists they are constantly finding that your genes are being switched on and off because of the environment. Genes alone do not determine an exact path in your life.
I saw the movie, he said. I know what it’s about. Listen to this. When girls get to be about twelve or so – he leaned toward us – their tits bleed.
Scars crossed her welded wrists.
And in some of the houses, people were getting old and sick and were dying, leaving others to grieve. It was happening all the time, unnoticed, and it was the thing that really mattered. What really mattered in life, what gave it weight, was death.
The following doodle: a girl with pigtails is bent under the weight of a gigantic boulder. Her cheeks puff out, and her rounded lips expel steam. One widening steam cloud contains the word Pressure, darkly retraced.
She had given birth to me and nursed me and brought me up. She had known me before I knew myself and now she had no say in the matter. Life started out one thing and then suddenly turned a corner and became something else.
She wanted out of the decorating scheme.
You went out with a girl at first because the sheer sight of her made you weak in the knees. You fell in love and were desperate not to let her get away. And yet the more you thought about her, the less you knew who she was. The hope was that love transcended all differences. That was the hope.
The worst thing about religion was religious people.
My change from girl to boy was far less dramatic than the distance anybody travels from infancy to adulthood.
We’re all well-acquainted with depression, we all know what the low moods are, but the mania was not something I knew much about. I didn’t know that it would make someone dress extravagantly or start to pun, and to stay up and drink.
I think it is important to remind people of the extent of our free will.
I was unemployable when I got out of college.