The proper study of Mankind is Everything.
You can mean more than one. You can mean thousands. I’m not in any immediate danger, I’ll say to you. I’ll pretend you can hear me. But it’s no good, because I know you can’t.
What is the real breath of a man – the breathing out or the breathing in?
We love each other, that’s true whatever it means, but we aren’t good at it; for some it’s a talent, for others only an addiction.
The truth is seldom welcome, especially at dinner.
When demons are required someone will always be found to supply the part, and whether you step forward or are pushed is all the same in the end.
For the children with their greedy little mouths represent the future, which like time itself will devour all now alive.
A man is just a woman’s strategy for making other women.
The best way of keeping a secret is to pretend there isn’t one.
Writing of the narrative kind, and perhaps all writing, is motivated deep down, by a fear or and fascination with mortality – by a desire to make the risky trip to the underworld and to bring something or someone back from the dead.
EXTINCTATHON, Monitored by MaddAddam. Adam named the living animals, MaddAddam names the dead ones. Do you want to play?
I knew what love was supposed to be: obsession with undertones of nausea.
This is how the girl who couldn’t speak and the man who couldn’t see fell in love.
A truth should exist, it should not be used like this. If I love you is that a fact or a weapon?
What we share may be a lot like a traffic accident but we get one another. We are survivors of each other. We have been shark to one another, but also lifeboat. That counts for something.
Things might have been different if she hadn’t been able to drift; if she’d had to concentrate on her next meal, instead of dwelling on all the injuries she felt we’d done her. An unearned income encourages self-pity in those already prone to it.
Ah men, why do you want all this attention? I can write poems for myself, make love to a doorknob if absolutely necessary. What do you have to offer me I can’t find otherwise except humiliation? Which I no longer need.
Faith is only a word, embroidered.
The objects I chose were designed to hold something, but I didn’t fill them up. They remained empty. They were little symbolic shrines to thirst.
It isn’t running away they’re afraid of. We wouldn’t get far. It’s those other escapes, the ones you can open in yourself, given a cutting edge.