To love another human in all of her splendor and imperfect perfection , it is a magnificent task…tremendous and foolish and human.
Freedom, I found is not only in the running but in the heart, the mind, the hands.
The contents of a house can trigger all sorts of revisions to family history.
Information, long of reach, devastating, and as a side benefit, a substance with no serious legal repercussions, was superior to any other form of power.
Only when you are secure enough not to fear immediate survival can you display creative intelligence in anything you do.
They’re all the same– the cop, the criminal, the defense, the prosecutor– they all share a fundamental belief in the malleability of truth
She compares the deepest wells of depression to gestation, to a time enclosed, a secluded lightlessness in which, unknown and unforced, we grow.
I am part of what she thinks is her illness, a symptom of which she thinks she has been cured. She, on the other hand, is what I was looking for.
Women don’t realize how much store men set on the regularity of their habits. We absorb their comings and goings into our bodies, their rhythms into our bones.
A woman’s body is the gate to this life. A man’s body is the gate to the next life.
I think she is confused by the way I want her, which is like nobody else. I know this deep down. I want her in a new way, a way she’s never been told about.
Old love, middle love, the kind of love that knows itself and knows that nothing lasts, is a desperate shared wildness.
If, as I suspect, my body survives by uttering itself over and over again, then I have some questions. If [I] am one word, so are my daughters, so are all of us in strings and loops. Each life is one short word slowly uttered.
Of course, English is a very powerful language, a colonizer’s language and a gift to a writer. English has destroyed and sucked up the languages of other cultures – its cruelty is its vitality.
Upon walking into Eva’s kitchen, something profound happened to Delphine. She experienced a fabulous expansion of being. Light-headed, she felt a swooping sensation and then a quiet, as though she’d settled like a bird.
And it occurred to me how even pulling trees that day, just months ago, I was in heaven. Unaware. I had known nothing even as the evil was occurring, I hadn’t been touched yet.
When small towns find they cannot harm the strangest of their members, when eccentrics show resilience, they are eventually embraced and even cherished.
Then his head tipped down on his chest and he fell into the instant sleep of the ancient and the very young.
And how funny, strange, that a thing can grow so powerful even when planted in the wrong place. Ideas too, I muttered. Ideas.
There will never come a time when I will be able to resist my emotions.
Ravens are the birds I’ll miss most when I die. If only the darkness into which we must look were composed of the black light of their limber intelligence. If only we did not have to die at all. Instead, become ravens.
I tried to get away from him, to get to that door, but instead I backed up against the wall and was stuck there in that white, white room.
I stood there in the shadowed doorway thinking with my tears. Yes, tears can be thoughts, why not?
Our songs travel the earth. We sing to one another. Not a single note is ever lost and no song is original. They all come from the same place and go back to a time when only the stones howled.
some people fall right through the hole in their lives. It’s invisible, but they come to it after time, never knowing where.
They were so strong in their beliefs that there came a time when it hardly mattered what exactly those beliefs were they all fused into a single stubbornness.
I was in love with the whole world and all that lived in its rainy arms.
I got well by talking. Death could not get a word in edgewise grew discouraged and traveled on.
I got well by talking. Death could not get a word in edgewise, grew discouraged, and traveled on.