Isn't it funny.I'm enjoying my hatred so much more than i ever enjoyed love. Love is temperamental. Tiring. It makes demands. Love uses you, changes its mind. But hatred, now, that's something you can use. Sculpt. Wield. It's hard, or soft, however you need it. Love humiliates you, but Hatred cradles you.

Don't turn over the rocks if you don't want to see the pale creatures who live under them.

Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow. Never expect to outgrow loneliness. Never hope to find people who will understand you, someone to fill that space. If you expect to find people who will understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment.

And if there is no god?You act as if there is, and it's the same thing.

The cake had a trick candle that wouldn't go out, so I didn't get my wish. Which was just that it would always be like this, that my life could be a party just for me.

What can I say about life? Do I praise it for letting you live, or damn it for allowing the rest?

The phoenix must burn to emerge.

Always learn poems by heart. They have to become the marrow in your bones. Like fluoride in the water, they'll make your soul impervious to the world's soft decay.

Always learn poems by heart,' she said. 'They have to become the marrow in your bones. Like fluoride in the water, they'll make your soul impervious to the world's soft decay.

A cliche is everything you've ever heard of.

A novel is like a dream in which everyone is you. They’re all parts of yourself.

I decided that if I was never going to sell anything as long as I lived, I might as well do what I want to do 'cause then at least I would've done what I wanted to do in life. What's that worth?

Remember it all, every insult, every tear. Tattoo it on the inside of your mind. In life, knowledge of poisons is essential. I've told you, nobody becomes an artist unless they have to.

I took the volume to a table, opened its soft, ivory pages... and fell into it as into a pool during dry season.

I hated labels anyway. People didn't fit in slots--prostitute, housewife, saint--like sorting the mail. We were so mutable, fluid with fear and desire, ideals and angles, changeable as water.

She would be half a planet away, floating in a turquoise sea, dancing by moonlight to flamenco guitar.

Rena noticed me watching it pass. 'You think they don't got problem?' Rena said. 'Everybody got problem. You got me, they got insurance, house payment, Preparation H.' She smiled, baring the part between her two upper teeth. 'We are the free birds. They want to be us.

A person didn’t need to be beautiful, they just needed to be loved. But I couldn’t help wanting it. If that was the way I could be loved, to be beautiful, I’d take it

They dream of men with gentle hands, eloquent with tenderness, fingers that brushed along a cheek, that outlined open lips in the lovers' braille. Hands that sculpted sweetness from sullen flesh, that traced breast and ignited hips, opening, kneading. Flesh becomes bread in the heat of those hands, braided and rising.

My mother once wrote a poem about rivers. They were women, she wrote. Starting out small girls, tiny streams decorated with wildflowers. They were torrents, gouging paths through sheer granite, flinging themselves off cliffs, fearless and irresistible. Later, they grew fat servicable, broad slow curves carrying commerce and sewage, but in their unconscious depths catfish gorged, grew the size of barges, and in the hundred-year storms, they rose up, forgetting the promises they made, the wedding vows, and drowned everything for miles around. Finally they gave out, birth-emptied, malarial, into a fan of swamps that met the ocean.

I couldn't imagine owning beauty like my mothers. I wouldn't dare.

What was beauty unless you intended to use it, like a hammer, or a key? It was just something for other people to use and admire, or envy, despise. To nail their dreams onto like a picture hanger on a blank wall. And so many girls saying, use me, dream me.

I thought clay must feel happy in the good potter's hand.

Just a beginner, but he learned so fast. Everything came so damn easy to him. Not true. The hard things cam easy. But the easy things he found impossibly hard.

I know what you are learning to endure. There is nothing to be done. Make sure nothing is wasted. Take notes. Remember it all, every insult, every tear. Tattoo it on the inside of your mind. In life, knowledge of poisons is essential. I've told you, nobody becomes an artist unless they have to.

She had forgotten about this, the narcotic of the crowd. This is why you came to hear music. To stop being yourself, to let that thing that you supposedly were go, and just be part of a mob, synchronized by the heavy beat, mesmerized by a singer with big smeary red lips, her spooky chant.

I couldn't stop thinking about the body, what a hard fact it was.That philosopher who said we think, therefore we are, should havespent an hour in the maternity ward of Waite Memorial Hospital. He'dhave had to change his whole philosophy. The mind was so thin, barely a spiderweb, with all its finethoughts, aspirations, and beliefs in its own importance. Watch howeasily it unravels, evaporates under the first lick of pain.

This was how girls left. They packed up their suitcases and walked away in high heels. They pretended they weren't crying, that it wasn't the worst day of their lives.

We tried not to be in the same room at the same time when Starr was home, we set the air on fire between us.

Never let a man stay the night,” she told me. “Dawn has a way of casting a pall on any night magic.

...and I thought, there was no God, there was only what you wanted.

The question of good and the nature of evil will always be one of philosophy’s most intriguing problems, up there with the problem of existence itself. If evil means to be self-motivated, to be the center of one’s own universe, to live on one’s own terms, then every artist, thinker, every original mind, is evil. Because we dare to look through our own eyes rather than mouth clichés lent us from the so-called Fathers. To dare to see is to steal fire from the Gods. This is mankind’s destiny, the engine which fuels us as a race.

I hated labels anyway. People didn’t fit in slots—prostitute, housewife, saint—like sorting the mail. We were so mutable, fluid with fear and desire, ideals and angles, changeable as water.

That was the thing about words, they were clear and specific--chair, eye, stone--but when you talked about feelings, words were too stiff, they were this and not that, they couldn't include all the meanings. In defining, they always left something out.

He was obsessed with obituaries. She'd never read them before, he couldn't believe it, to him it was like someone who'd never read the funnies...Michael always wanted to know what they died of- accidental gunshot wounds, overdose, cancer. 'Was it suicide?' That's what he really wanted to know.

I almost said, you’re not broken, you’re just going through something. But I couldn’t. She knew. There was something terribly wrong with her, all the way inside. She was like a big diamond with a dead spot in the middle. I was supposed to breathe life into that dead spot, but it hadn’t worked.

I wanted to tell her not to entertain despair like this. Despair wasn't a guest, you didn't play its favourite music, find it a comfortable chair. Despair was the enemy.

I hadn’t understood at the time. If sinners were so unhappy,why would they prefer their suffering? But now I knew why.Without my wounds, who was I? My scars were my face, my pastwas my life.

A month ago she would have been embarrassed at the confidence. Now she felt a surprising kinship. She was a citizen of the new land, a country she had never before visited, only a rumor, this vast unseen tract, its boundary exactly that of the whole world, taking up the space and shape of the world but completely unlike it. It had a different atmosphere, hard to breathe, and how heavy you were here, it pulled you down like the gravity on Jupiter.

She laughed so easily when she was happy. But also when she was sad.

Never let a man stay the night. Dawn has a way of casting a pall on any night magic.

don't sulk. you're acting just like a man.

Men... No matter how unappealing, each of them imagines he is somehow worthy.

She’s never where she is,' I said. 'She’s only inside her head.

Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow. Never expect to outgrow loneliness. Never hope to find people who will understand you, someone to fill that space. An intelligent, sensitive person is the exception, the very great exception. If you expect to find people who will understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment. The best you'll ever do is to understand yourself, know what it is that you want, and not let the cattle stand in your way.

Loneliness ia a human condition

I imagined the lies the valedictorian was telling them right now. About the exciting future that lies ahead. I wish she'd tell them the truth: Half of you have gone as far in life as you're ever going to. Look around. It's all downhill from here. The rest of us will go a bit further, a steady job, a trip to Hawaii, or a move to Phoenix, Arizona, but out of fifteen hundred how many will do anything truly worthwhile, write a play, paint a painting that will hang in a gallery, find a cure for herpes? Two of us, maybe three? And how many will find true love? About the same. And enlightenment? Maybe one. The rest of us will make compromises, find excuses, someone or something to blame, and hold that over our hearts like a pendant on a chain.

Nobody had forgotten anything here. In Berlin, you had to wrestle with the past, you had to build on the ruins, inside them. It wasn't like America where we scraped the earth clean, thinking we could start again every time.

Who am I? I am who I say I am and tomorrow someone else entirely. You are too nostalgic, you want memory to secure you, console you. The past is a bore. What matters is only oneself and what one creates from what one has learned. Imagination uses what it needs and discards the rest— where you want to erect a museum. Don't hoard the past, Astrid. Don't cherish anything. Burn it. The artist is the phoenix who burns to emerge.

Michael, in a motel in Twentynine Palms, a gun in his hands. Not at Meredith's, painting in an explosion of new creation. Not over on Sunset, digging through the record bins, or at Launderland separating the darks and lights. Not at the Chinese market, looking at the fish with their still-bright eyes. Not at the Vista watching an old movie. Not sketching down at Echo Park. He was in a motel room in Twentynine Palms, putting a bullet in his brain.

Meredith's father, the composer, who shot himself in this house. Came all the way from Vienna to shoot himself in LA. Escaped the Nazis but not himself.

She wished Michael had had a grandfather like this guy Morty, someone to tell him, "It's a rotten deal, the house always wins. Just sit at the table and play for all you're worth." Instead of one who showed him how to die.

The phoenix must burn to emerge

You must find a boy your own age. Someone mild and beautiful to be your lover. Someone who will tremble for your touch, offer you a marguerite by its long stem with his eyes lowered. Someone whose fingers are a poem.

Love humiliates you, hatred cradles you.

Oleander time, she said. Lovers who kill each other now will blame it on the wind.

I gazed up as if I hadn't heard, but what I was thinking was, tellme more about the pretty girls. I was embarrassed for wanting it, itwas base, what did pretty matter? I had thought that so many timeswith my mother. A person didn't need to be beautiful, they justneeded to be loved. But I couldn't help wanting it. If that was theway I could be loved, to be beautiful, I'd take it.

Someday I would have lovers and write a poem after

For what is writing besides capturing thoughts that belong to all of us, so that we can recognize ourselves, undestand ourselves, and perhaps, each other. Every thoughtful book about love makes us better lovers, I think. It opens the gates of perception.

I know it feels like you have all these options and when you make a decision, you lose a world of possibilities. But the reality is, until you make a decision, you have nothing at all.

A womans mistakes are different from a girls

For lunch, we drove into the hills and parked in the dappled shade of a big sycamore, its powdery white bark like a woman's body against the uncanny blue sky.

In a perverse way, I was glad for the stitches, glad it would show, that there would be scars. What was the point in just being hurt on the inside? It should bloody well show.

Do you ever want to go home?' I asked Paul.He brushed an ash from my face. 'It's the century of the displaced person,' he said. 'You can never go home.

You were my home, Mother. I had no home but you

Isn't it funny. I'm enjoying my hatred so much more than I ever enjoyed love. Love is tempermental. Tiring. It makes demands. Love uses you. Changes its mind..... But hatred, now. That's something you can use. Sculpt. Wield. It's hard or soft, however you need it. Love humiliates you, but hatred cradels you. It's so soothing. I feel infinetly better now

Although she was giddy with exhaustion, sleep was a lover who refused to be touched....

The expression in her eyes was bitter as nightshade. 'You ask me about regret? Let me tell you a few things about regret, my darling. There is no end to it. You cannot find the beginning of the chain that brought us from there to here. Should you regret the whole chain, and the air between, or each link separately, as if you could uncouple them? Do you regret the beginning which ended so badly, or just the ending itself? I've given more thought to this question than you can begin to imagine.

Let me tell you a few things about regret, my darling. There is no end to it. You cannot find the beginning of the chain that brought us from there to here. Should you regret the whole chain, and the air in between, or each link separately?

I wanted to tell her not to entertain despair like this. Despaire wasn't a guest, you didn't play its favorite music, find it a comfortable chair. Despair was the enemy."-white oleander

I thought of my mother as Queen Christina, cool and sad, eyes trained on some distant horizon. That was where she belonged, in furs and palaces of rare treasures, fireplaces large enough to roast a reindeer, ships of Swedish maple.

If it weren't for me, she wouldn't have to take jobs like this. She would be half a planet away, floating in a turquoise sea, dancing by moonlight to flamenco guitar. I felt my guilt like a brand.... I had seen girls clamor for new clothes and complain about what their mothers made for dinner. I was always mortified. Didn't they know they were tying their mothers to the ground? Weren't chains ashamed of their prisoners?

She took a life because someonehumiliated her, hurt her image of herself as the Valkyrie, thestainless warrior. Exposed her weakness, which was only love. So sheavenged herself. So easy to justify, I wrote to her. It's because youfelt like a victim you did it. If you were really strong, you couldhave tolerated the humiliation.

Her hatred glittered irresistibly. I could see it, the jewel, it was sapphire, it was the cold lakes of Norway.

Love is temperamental. Tiring. It makes demands. Love uses you, changes its mind. But hatred, now, that's something you can use. Sculpt. Wield. It's hard, or soft, however you need it. Love humiliates you, but Hatred cradles you.

The moon rose, squatting in the strained blue.

Whenever she turned her steep focus to me, I felt the warmth that flowers must feel when they bloom through the snow, under the first concentrated rays of the sun.

don't turn over rocks if you don't want to see the pale creatures who live underneath them.

Her fingers moved among barnacles and mussels, blue-black, sharp-edged. Neon red starfish were limp Dalis on the rocks, surrounded by bouquets of stinging anemones and purple bursts of spiny sea urchins.

Don't turn over rocks if you don't want to see the pale creatures who live under them.

My heart felt like a balloon that was filling too full, and I panicked. I might get the bends, the way scuba divers did when they surfaced too fast.

I wanted to freeze this moment forever, the chimes, the slight splash of the water, the chink of the dogs’ leashes, laughter from the pool, the skritch of my mother’s dip-pen, the smell of the trees, the stillness. I wished I could shut it in a locket to wear around my neck. I wished a sleep would find us, at this absolute second, like sleep over the castle of sleeping beauty.

We strive for beauty and balance, the sensual over the sentimental.

Now it seemed unbelievable, the innocence of a girl in a fairy tale.

Who are you? the band sang. I tried to remember but I really couldn't say.

Marvel hates her because she's pretty and doesn't have any kids to worry about.

I was always mortified.Didn't they know they were tying thier mothers to the ground? Weren't chains ashamed of their prisoners?

Now I wish she'd never broken any of her rules. I understood why she held to them so hard. Once you broke the first one, they all broke, one by one, like firecrackers exploding in your face in a parking lot on the Fourth of July.

The pearls weren't really white, they were a warm oyster beige, with little knots in between so if they broke, you only lost one. I wished my life could be like that, knotted up so that even if something broke, the whole thing wouldn't come apart.

His voice was cloves and nightingales, it took us to spice markets in the Celebs, we drifted with him on a houseboat beyond the Coral Sea. We were like cobras following a reed flute.