"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"Loneliness ia a human condition"

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

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

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

"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."

"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."

"The phoenix must burn to emerge."

"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"

"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."

"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."

"Love humiliates you, hatred cradles you."

"A lot of people think they should be happy all the time. But the writer understands you need both. You need the whole piano: the richness of the whole human experience. Depression, suffering and anger are all part of being human."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"I tried writing fiction as a little kid, but had a teacher humiliate me, so didn't write again until I was a senior in college."

"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 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?"

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

"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."

"Someday I would have lovers and write a poem after"

"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."

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

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

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

"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."

"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."

"A womans mistakes are different from a girls"

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

"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."

"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?"

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

"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."

"I always read poetry before I write, to sensitize me to the rhythms and music of language."

"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."

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

"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."