“There are so many of you, and you are still just the way I thought I'd grow up, with all that was enviably grown-up about you: the lace tops with modesty inserts, and the spangles as if for nights ...”

“We sit in the ruin, each reading a book, or three of us read out of four. Three different voices speak to us. We have taught the children to read again this week. Here, where there is no voice, apa...”

“I am tired and drunk and still hungry. He is full of steak and Coca-Cola and, presumably, energy: enough energy to cross the road and walk up the steps inside the tower of the cathedral, which I ha...”

“I finally know the difference between pleasing and loving, obeying and respecting. It has taken me so many years to be okay with being different, and with being this alive, this intense. (xxvi)”

“Spring passes and one remembers one's innocence.Summer passes and one remembers one's exuberance.Autumn passes and one remembers one's reverence.Winter passes and one remembers one's perseverance.”

“Birthdays could be such a bummer when you were older than the country you lived in.”

“Creativity is the state of consciousness in which you enter into the treasury of your innermost being and bring the beauty into manifestation. (p.232)”

“Do you think I'm pretty?I think you're beautifulBeautiful?You are so beautiful, it hurts sometimes.”

“As if you were on fire from within.The moon lives in the lining of your skin.”

“HOW do you define a word without concrete meaning? To each his own, the saying goes, soWHYpush to attain an ideal state of being that no two random people will agree isWHERE you want to be? Faultle...”

“When she thinks of the toxins built up inside of her from so many years of eating carelessly, of the resentment that has grown steadily over fifteen years of marriage, of the stretch marks and the ...”

“It's not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathingthey are not all bad. Those devils have been my angels. Without them I would nev...”