“Discipline allows magic. To be a writer is to be the very best of assassins. You do not sit down and write every day to force the Muse to show up. You get into the habit of writing every day so tha...”

“Every kid's afraid of that right? That someday you'll be left in a corner, like a toy, staring with button eyes and a broken heart.”

“The obscenities of this country are not girls like you. It is the poverty which is obscene, and the criminal irresponsibility of the leaders who make this poverty a deadening reality. The obsceniti...”

“You and me, baby girl, we're too jaded. We just want mind-blowing sex with someone who knows we're fucked up and accepts it.”

“In this world, if you raise objections saying, my mother-in-law harasses me. My father-in-law harasses me, then there is no end to it. Instead, just put up a sign that says, no objection whatsoever...”

“Though there had yet to be a victor in this great war that had begun almost three years ago, Maurice had written to her that they had, all of them, on all sides, lost their freedom. Freedom to thin...”

“Then I thought, boy, isn't that just typical? You wait and wait and wait for something, and then when it happens, you feel sad.”

“I'm living under water. Everything seems slow and far away. I know there's a world up there, a sunlit quick world where time runs like dry sand through an hourglass, but down here, where I am, air ...”