writing it because I’m never convinced I’ve figured it out. We are not tightly woven, plot-driven novels. We are all just small collections of events, impressions, moods, beliefs, which, in shards, we call our selves.

have almost no idea how to be without design or a wish formed for the next moment. Among a thousand other things, I have been tuned to hear the phone ring

There is the love that marries and the love that stays, your inevitable deaths the scaffolding around which you arrange your lives.

I was not abused; most people weren’t. But I was—we all have been—marked by fallible people, since there is no other kind.

Perhaps it is true that the only words we say are the words we’d like to hear, that the praises we sing are the praises we would delight in, that the faces we like are in some way our own, that we touch our lovers in order to tell them how we would like to be touched. This is how we spend our lives: looking for someone to get our stories straight,

When is a story a lie? When it forgets to leave something human and difficult at its core.

My biggest fear is choosing wrongly and having regrets from which I cannot recover. Everything is very, very heavy when you’re alone and ponderous and wary and you don’t know anymore whom to please or how to do it.

feel that the noises of our bodies, the texture of our arches and thrusts, are too precious to escape the notice of another?

ember to blow on and then mock its ready blush?