A prison does not only lock its inmates inside, it keeps all others out. Her strongest prison is of her own construction.
How old do you have to get before wisdom descends like a plastic bag over your head and you learn to keep your big mouth shut? Maybe never. Maybe you get more frivolous with age.
There’s something to be said for hunger: at least it lets you know you’re still alive.
Is anything wrong, dear? the old joke went. No, why? You moved. Just don’t move.
A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The wastebasket has evolved for a reason. Think of it as the altar of the Muse Oblivion, to whom you sacrifice your botched first drafts, the tokens of your human imperfection.
A fist is more than the sum of its fingers.
When they’re gone out of his head, these words, they’ll be gone, everywhere, forever. As if they had never been.
They spent the first three years of school getting you to pretend stuff and then the rest of it marking you down if you did the same thing.
I feel like cotton candy: sugar and air. Squeeze me and I’d turn into a small sickly damp wad of weeping pinky-red.
Extreme good, extreme evil: the abilities required are similar.
In the evenings there’s been thunder, a distant bumping and stumbling, like God on a sullen binge.
This is what I miss, Cordelia: not something that’s gone, but something that will never happen. Two old women giggling over their tea.
When I am writing fiction, I believe I am much better organized, more methodical – one has to be when writing a novel. Writing poetry is a state of free float.
Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.
I have a big following among the biogeeks of this world. Nobody ever puts them in books.
There’s blood, a taste I remember. It tastes of orange popsicles, penny gumballs, red licorice, gnawed hair, dirty ice.
Your hand is a warm stone I hold between two words.
It’s evening, one of those gray water-color washes, like liquid dust.
The alcohol smell is on my fingers, cold and remote, piercing like a steel pin going in. It smells like white enamel basins. When I look up at the stars in the nighttime, cold and white and sharp, I think they must smell like that.
You fit into me like a hook into an eye, a fish hook, an open eye.