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

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

“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.”

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

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

“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 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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

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

“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.”

“I feel like the word shatter.”

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

“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.”

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

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

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

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

“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.”