“We still think of a powerful man as a born leader and a powerful woman as an anomaly.”

“There is more than one kind of freedom," said Aunt Lydia. "Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don't underrate it.”

“Knowing too much about other people puts you in their power, they have a claim on you, you are forced to understand their reasons for doing things and then you are weakened.”

“Romance takes place in the middle distance. Romance is looking in at yourself through a window clouded with dew. Romance means leaving things out: where life grunts and shuffles, romance only sighs.”

“Farewells can be shattering, but returns are surely worse. Solid flesh can never live up to the bright shadow cast by its absence. Time and distance blur the edges; then suddenly the beloved has arrived, and it's noon with its merciless light, and every spot and pore and wrinkle and bristle stands clear.”

“Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It's like the tide going out, revealing whatever's been thrown away and sunk: broken bottles, old gloves, rusting pop cans, nibbled fishbodies, bones. This is the kind of thing you see if you sit in the darkness with open eyes, not knowing the future. The ruin you've made.”

Maybe none of this is about control. Maybe it isn't really about who can own whom, who can do what to whom and get away with it, even as far as death. Maybe it isn't about who can sit and who has to kneel or stand or lie down, legs spread open. Maybe it's about who can do what to whom and be forgiven for it. Never tell me it amounts to the same thing.”

“Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth.”

“The best way of keeping a secret is to pretend there isn't one.”

“If we were all on trial for our thoughts, we would all be hanged.”

“But people will do anything rather than admit that their lives have no meaning. No use, that is. No plot.”

“The moment of betrayal is the worst, the moment when you know beyond any doubt that you've been betrayed: that some other human being has wished you that much evil”

“And she finds it difficult to believe—that a person would love her even when she isn't trying. Trying to figure out what other people need, trying to be worthy.”

“We thought we had such problems. How were we to know we were happy?”

“Women have curious ways of hurting someone else. They hurt themselves instead; or else they do it so the guy doesn't even know he's been hurt until much later. Then he finds out. Then his dick falls off.”

“How could I be sleeping with this particular man.... Surely only true love could justify my lack of taste.”

“Gone mad is what they say, and sometimes Run mad, as if mad is a different direction, like west; as if mad is a different house you could step into, or a separate country entirely. But when you go mad you don't go any other place, you stay where you are. And somebody else comes in.”

“I am not your justification for existence.”

“Hatred would have been easier. With hatred, I would have known what to do. Hatred is clear, metallic, one-handed, unwavering; unlike love.”

“You can think clearly only with your clothes on.”

“All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel.

“But some people can't tell where it hurts. They can't calm down. They can't ever stop howling.”

“If he wants to be an asshole, it's a free country. Millions before him have made the same life choice.”

“I want to be held and told my name. I want to be valued, in ways that I am not; I want to be more than valuable. I repeat my former name; remind myself of what I once could do, how others saw me. I want to steal something.”

“What am I living for and what am I dying for are the same question.”

“A home filled with nothing but yourself. It's heavy, that lightness. It's crushing, that emptiness.”

“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.”