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 heart of Jesus glowed, because it was holy. Holy things glowed in general.
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.
Old lovers go the way of old photographs, bleaching out gradually as in a slow bath of acid: first the moles and pimples, then the shadings. Then the faces themselves, until nothing remains but the general outlines.
I lie on the floor, washed by nothing and hanging on. I cry at night. I am afraid of hearing voices, or a voice. I have come to the edge, of the land. I could get pushed over.
A home filled with nothing but yourself. It’s heavy, that lightness. It’s crushing, that emptiness.
They will not let you have peace, they don’t want you to have anything they don’t have themselves.