But some people can’t tell where it hurts. They can’t calm down. They can’t ever stop howling.
If I were going to convert to any religion I would probably choose Catholicism because it at least has female saints and the Virgin Mary.
Writing is alone, but I don’t think it’s lonely. Ask any writer if they feel lonely when they’re writing their book, and I think they’ll say no.
Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth.
I never say I’m an “ist” of any kind unless I know how the other person is defining it.
When you’re unhinged, things make their way out of you that should be kept inside, and other things get in that ought to be shut out. The locks lose their powers. The guards go to sleep. The passwords fail.
I walk away from him. It’s enormously pleasing to me, this walking away. It’s like being able to make people appear and vanish, at will.
Happiness is a garden walled with glass: there’s no way in or out. In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys. It’s loss and regret and misery and yearning that drive the story forward, along its twisted road.
Romance takes place in the middle distance. Romance is looking in at yourself through a window clouded with dew. Romance means leaving things out: where life grunts and shuffles, romance only sighs.
Screw poetry, it’s you I want, your taste, rain on you, mouth on your skin.
Science is not something that exists apart from human beings. It’s one of the things we do as human beings, and we always have done science and technology in some form.
There are some virtues to not saying what you think all the time.
The object is very clear in the fight against racism; you have reasons why you’re opposed to it. But when you’re writing a novel, you don’t want the reader to come out of it voting yes or no to some question. Life is more complicated than that.
Writing poetry is a state of free float.
It’s rather useless to write a gripping narrative with nothing in it but climate change because novels are always about people even if they purport to be about rabbits or robots.
Time has not stood still. It has washed over me, washed me away, as if I’m nothing more than a woman of sand, left by a careless child too near the water.
Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space.
Today on the way home, it snows. Big, soft caressing flakes fall onto our skin like cold moths; the air fills with feathers.
I was horrified in high school by the fate of the hanged maids at the end of the Odyssey; it seemed unfair to me, even then.
There were a lot of gods. Gods always come in handy, they justify almost anything.