“Potential has a shelf life.”

“Forgiving men is so much easier than forgiving women.”

“I feel like the word shatter.”

“It's impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was, because of what you say can never be exact, you always have to leave something out, there are too many parts, sides, crosscurrents, nuances; too many gestures, which could mean this or that, too many shapes which can never be fully described, too many flavors, in the air or on the tongue, half-colors, too many.”

“Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.”

“You can't help what you feel, but you can help how you behave”

“I knew what love was supposed to be: obsession with undertones of nausea. ”

“All you have to do, I tell myself, is keep your mouth shut and look stupid. It shouldn't be that hard.”

“Knowing was a temptation. What you don't know won't tempt you.”

“Happiness is a garden walled with glass: there's no way in or out. In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys. It's loss and regret and misery and yearning that drive the story forward, along its twisted road.”

“Maybe the life I think I'm living is a paranoid delusion...Sanity is a valuable possession; I hoard it the way people once hoarded money. I save it, so I will have enough, when the time comes.”

“We yearned for the future. How did we learn it, that talent for insatiability?”

“The Eskimo has fifty-names for snow because it is important to them; there ought to be as many for love.”

“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.”

“When I am lonely for boys it’s their bodies I miss. I study their hands lifting the cigarettes in the darkness of the movie theaters, the slope of a shoulder, the angle of a hip. Looking at them sideways, I examine them in different lights. My love for them is visual: that is the part of them I would like to possess. Don’t move, I think. Stay like that, let me have that.”

“I believe in the resistance as I believe there can be no light without shadow; or rather, no shadow unless there is also light.”

“Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you'd be boiled to death before you knew it.”

“People cry at weddings for the same reason they cry at happy endings: because they so desperately want to believe in something they know is not credible.”

“Nobody dies from the lack of sex. It's lack of love we die from.”

“This is how the girl who couldn't speak and the man who couldn't see fell in love.”

“I wonder which is preferable, to walk around all your life swollen up with your own secrets until you burst from the pressure of them, or to have them sucked out of you, every paragraph, every sentence, every word of them, so at the end you're depleted of all that was once as precious to you as hoarded gold, as close to you as your skin - everything that was of the deepest importance to you, everything that made you cringe and wish to conceal, everything that belonged to you alone - and must spend the rest of your days like an empty sack flapping in the wind, an empty sack branded with a bright fluorescent label so that everyone will know what sort of secrets used to be inside you?”

“I want everything back, the way it was. But there is no point to it, this wanting.”

“Beginnings are sudden, but also insidious. They creep up on you sideways, they keep to the shadows, they lurk unrecognized. Then, later, they spring.”

“He doesn't know which is worse, a past he can't regain or a present that will destroy him if he looks at it too clearly. Then there's the future. Sheer vertigo.”

“Never pray for justice, because you might get some.”

“What is it the I'll want from you? Not love: that would be too much to ask. Not forgiveness, which isn't yours to bestow. Only a listener, perhaps; only someone who will see me. Don't prettify me though, whatever else you do: I have no wish to be a decorated skull.

“If I love you, is that a fact or a weapon?”

“To want is to have a weakness.”

“That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn't even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn't even an enemy you could put your finger on.”

“Should is a futile word. It's about what didn't happen. It belongs in a parallel universe. It belongs in another dimension of space.”

“Vanity is becoming a nuisance, I can see why women give it up, eventually. But I'm not ready for that yet.”

“And yet it disturbs me to learn I have hurt someone unintentionally. I want all my hurts to be intentional.”

“It isn't running away they're afraid of. We wouldn't get far. It's those other escapes, the ones you can open in yourself, given a cutting edge.”

“In the end, we'll all become stories.”

“What we share may be a lot like a traffic accident but we get one another. We are survivors of each other. We have been shark to one another, but also lifeboat. That counts for something.”

“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.”

“Nature is to zoos as God is to churches.”

“Why is it we want so badly to memorialize ourselves? Even while we're still alive. We wish to assert our existence, like dogs peeing on fire hydrants.”

“Every habit he's ever had is still there in his body, lying dormant like flowers in the desert. Given the right conditions, all his old addictions would burst into full and luxuriant bloom.”

“Happy as a clam, is what my mother says for happy. I am happy as a clam: hard-shelled, firmly closed.”

“Home is where the heart is, I thought now, gathering myself together in Betty's Luncheonette. I had no heart any more, it had been broken; or not broken, it simply wasn't there any more. It had been scooped neatly out of me like the yolk from a hard-boiled egg, leaving the rest of me bloodless and congealed and hollow.

“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.”

“What fabrications they are, mothers. Scarecrows, wax dolls for us to stick pins into, crude diagrams. We deny them an existence of their own, we make them up to suit ourselves -- our own hungers, our own wishes, our own deficiencies.”

“This is what I miss, Cordelia: not something that’s gone, but something that will never happen. Two old women giggling over their tea.”

“For if the world treats you well, Sir, you come to believe you are deserving of it.”

“Why does the mind do such things? Turn on us, rend us, dig the claws in. If you get hungry enough, they say, you start eating your own heart. Maybe it's much the same.”

“After everything that's happened, how can the world still be so beautiful? Because it is.”

“Murderess is a strong word to have attached to you. It has a smell to it, that word - musky and oppressive, like dead flowers in a vase. Sometimes at night I whisper it over to myself: Murderess, Murderess. It rustles, like a taffeta skirt across the floor.”

“They wore blouses with buttons down the front that suggested the possibilities of the word undone. These women could be undone; or not. They seemed to be able to choose. ”

“As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes.”