Don’t turn over the rocks if you don’t want to see the pale creatures who live under them.
And if there is no god?You act as if there is, and it’s the same thing.
The cake had a trick candle that wouldn’t go out, so I didn’t get my wish. Which was just that it would always be like this, that my life could be a party just for me.
What can I say about life? Do I praise it for letting you live, or damn it for allowing the rest?
Always learn poems by heart. They have to become the marrow in your bones. Like fluoride in the water, they’ll make your soul impervious to the world’s soft decay.
Always learn poems by heart,’ she said. ‘They have to become the marrow in your bones. Like fluoride in the water, they’ll make your soul impervious to the world’s soft decay.
A novel is like a dream in which everyone is you. They’re all parts of yourself.
I decided that if I was never going to sell anything as long as I lived, I might as well do what I want to do ’cause then at least I would’ve done what I wanted to do in life. What’s that worth?
Remember it all, every insult, every tear. Tattoo it on the inside of your mind. In life, knowledge of poisons is essential. I’ve told you, nobody becomes an artist unless they have to.
I took the volume to a table, opened its soft, ivory pages… and fell into it as into a pool during dry season.
I hated labels anyway. People didn’t fit in slots–prostitute, housewife, saint–like sorting the mail. We were so mutable, fluid with fear and desire, ideals and angles, changeable as water.
She would be half a planet away, floating in a turquoise sea, dancing by moonlight to flamenco guitar.
A person didn’t need to be beautiful, they just needed to be loved. But I couldn’t help wanting it. If that was the way I could be loved, to be beautiful, I’d take it
I couldn’t imagine owning beauty like my mothers. I wouldn’t dare.
I thought clay must feel happy in the good potter’s hand.
Just a beginner, but he learned so fast. Everything came so damn easy to him. Not true. The hard things cam easy. But the easy things he found impossibly hard.
This was how girls left. They packed up their suitcases and walked away in high heels. They pretended they weren’t crying, that it wasn’t the worst day of their lives.
We tried not to be in the same room at the same time when Starr was home, we set the air on fire between us.
Never let a man stay the night,” she told me. “Dawn has a way of casting a pall on any night magic.
…and I thought, there was no God, there was only what you wanted.
I hated labels anyway. People didn’t fit in slots—prostitute, housewife, saint—like sorting the mail. We were so mutable, fluid with fear and desire, ideals and angles, changeable as water.
I wanted to tell her not to entertain despair like this. Despair wasn’t a guest, you didn’t play its favourite music, find it a comfortable chair. Despair was the enemy.
I hadn’t understood at the time. If sinners were so unhappy,why would they prefer their suffering? But now I knew why.Without my wounds, who was I? My scars were my face, my pastwas my life.
She laughed so easily when she was happy. But also when she was sad.
Never let a man stay the night. Dawn has a way of casting a pall on any night magic.
Men… No matter how unappealing, each of them imagines he is somehow worthy.
She’s never where she is,’ I said. ‘She’s only inside her head.
Nobody had forgotten anything here. In Berlin, you had to wrestle with the past, you had to build on the ruins, inside them. It wasn’t like America where we scraped the earth clean, thinking we could start again every time.
Meredith’s father, the composer, who shot himself in this house. Came all the way from Vienna to shoot himself in LA. Escaped the Nazis but not himself.
She wished Michael had had a grandfather like this guy Morty, someone to tell him, “It’s a rotten deal, the house always wins. Just sit at the table and play for all you’re worth.” Instead of one who showed him how to die.
You must find a boy your own age. Someone mild and beautiful to be your lover. Someone who will tremble for your touch, offer you a marguerite by its long stem with his eyes lowered. Someone whose fingers are a poem.
Oleander time, she said. Lovers who kill each other now will blame it on the wind.
Someday I would have lovers and write a poem after
I know it feels like you have all these options and when you make a decision, you lose a world of possibilities. But the reality is, until you make a decision, you have nothing at all.
For lunch, we drove into the hills and parked in the dappled shade of a big sycamore, its powdery white bark like a woman’s body against the uncanny blue sky.
In a perverse way, I was glad for the stitches, glad it would show, that there would be scars. What was the point in just being hurt on the inside? It should bloody well show.
Do you ever want to go home?’ I asked Paul.He brushed an ash from my face. ‘It’s the century of the displaced person,’ he said. ‘You can never go home.
Although she was giddy with exhaustion, sleep was a lover who refused to be touched….
Let me tell you a few things about regret, my darling. There is no end to it. You cannot find the beginning of the chain that brought us from there to here. Should you regret the whole chain, and the air in between, or each link separately?
I wanted to tell her not to entertain despair like this. Despaire wasn’t a guest, you didn’t play its favorite music, find it a comfortable chair. Despair was the enemy.”-white oleander
I thought of my mother as Queen Christina, cool and sad, eyes trained on some distant horizon. That was where she belonged, in furs and palaces of rare treasures, fireplaces large enough to roast a reindeer, ships of Swedish maple.
Her hatred glittered irresistibly. I could see it, the jewel, it was sapphire, it was the cold lakes of Norway.
Love is temperamental. Tiring. It makes demands. Love uses you, changes its mind. But hatred, now, that’s something you can use. Sculpt. Wield. It’s hard, or soft, however you need it. Love humiliates you, but Hatred cradles you.
Whenever she turned her steep focus to me, I felt the warmth that flowers must feel when they bloom through the snow, under the first concentrated rays of the sun.
don’t turn over rocks if you don’t want to see the pale creatures who live underneath them.
Her fingers moved among barnacles and mussels, blue-black, sharp-edged. Neon red starfish were limp Dalis on the rocks, surrounded by bouquets of stinging anemones and purple bursts of spiny sea urchins.
Don’t turn over rocks if you don’t want to see the pale creatures who live under them.
My heart felt like a balloon that was filling too full, and I panicked. I might get the bends, the way scuba divers did when they surfaced too fast.
We strive for beauty and balance, the sensual over the sentimental.
Now it seemed unbelievable, the innocence of a girl in a fairy tale.
Who are you? the band sang. I tried to remember but I really couldn’t say.
Marvel hates her because she’s pretty and doesn’t have any kids to worry about.
I was always mortified.Didn’t they know they were tying thier mothers to the ground? Weren’t chains ashamed of their prisoners?
Now I wish she’d never broken any of her rules. I understood why she held to them so hard. Once you broke the first one, they all broke, one by one, like firecrackers exploding in your face in a parking lot on the Fourth of July.
His voice was cloves and nightingales, it took us to spice markets in the Celebs, we drifted with him on a houseboat beyond the Coral Sea. We were like cobras following a reed flute.
I tried writing fiction as a little kid, but had a teacher humiliate me, so didn’t write again until I was a senior in college.
My mother never met a gadget she didn’t like. There were tube pans for baking the angel food cakes my father could have after his first heart attack, and Bundt pans and loaf pans and baking pans and grilling pans.
I always read poetry before I write, to sensitize me to the rhythms and music of language.
Depression, suffering and anger are all part of being human.
A lot of people think they should be happy all the time. But the writer understands you need both. You need the whole piano: the richness of the whole human experience. Depression, suffering and anger are all part of being human.