My own unhappiness was starting to become a habit, in the way that Beckett described sorrow becoming ‘a thing you can keep adding to all your life … like a stamp or an egg collection’.

Above all else, it is an act of immense generosity to be the architect of everyone else’s well-being.

She thought of the needle as an object of psychological repair – and what she wanted to repair, she said, was the past.

The foreigner, the stranger, he too must learn to make a forgery of himself. He must imitate the host culture.

tempest (long lurking in the clouds) might bring us closer to how we want to be in the world.

We either die of the past or we become an artist.

I will never stop grieving for my long-held wish for enduring love that does not reduce its major players to something less than they are. I am

she made art because her emotions were bigger than herself.

Chaos is supposed to be what we most fear but I have come to believe it might be what we most want. If we don’t believe in the future we are planning, the house we are mortgaged to, the person who sleeps by our side, it is possible that a