"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."

"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."

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

"The moon rose, squatting in the strained blue."

"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."

"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"

"A cliche is everything you've ever heard of."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

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

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

"Don't sulk. you're acting just like a man."

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

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"My mother never met a gadget she didn't like. There were tube pans for baking the angel food cakes my father could have after his first heart attack, and Bundt pans and loaf pans and baking pans and grilling pans."

"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?"

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"Depression, suffering and anger are all part of being human."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."