I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary.

How could I be sleeping with this particular man.... Surely only true love could justify my lack of taste.

Hatred would have been easier. With hatred, I would have known what to do. Hatred is clear, metallic, one-handed, unwavering; unlike love.

A truth should exist,it should not be usedlike this. If I love youis that a fact or a weapon?

Nobody dies from the lack of sex. It's lack of love we die from.

The Eskimo has fifty-names for snow because it is important to them; there ought to be as many for love.

This is how the girl who couldn't speak and the man who couldn't see fell in love.

A home filled with nothing but yourself. It's heavy, that lightness. It's crushing, that emptiness.

Potential has a shelf life.

Don't let the bastards grind you down.

All you have to do, I tell myself, is keep your mouth shut and look stupid. It shouldn't be that hard.

I'm not senile," I snapped. "If I burn the house down it will be on purpose.

What you don’t know won’t hurt you. A dubious maxim: sometimes what you don’t know can hurt you very much.

There were a lot of gods. Gods always come in handy, they justify almost anything.

You might even provide a Heaven for them. We need You for that. Hell we can make for ourselves.

We need God to provide a heaven. Hell we can make for ourselves.

The truth is seldom welcome, especially at dinner.

It must have been then that I began to lose faith in reasonable argument as the sole measure of truth.

We understand more than we know.

Neither of us says the word love, not once. It would be tempting fate; it would be romance, bad luck.

You fit into melike a hook into an eyea fish hookan open eye

Screw poetry, it's you I want,your taste, rainon you, mouth on your skin.

Where do the words gowhen we have said them?

This world is not enough, but it will have to do. You can either hold on or let go.

She talks with wolves, without knowing what sort of beasts they are:Where have you been all my life? they ask.Where have I been all my life? she replies.

I planned my death carefully, unlike my life, which meandered along from one thing to another, despite my feeble attempts to control it.

If you really want to stay the same age you are now forever and ever, she'd be thinking, try jumping off the roof: death's a sure-fire method for stopping time.

Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.

There I am, in the Grade Six class picture, smiling broadly. Happy as a clam, is what my mother says for happy. I am happy as a clam: hardshelled, firmly closed.

They wouldn't want you to mope, would they? Those who didn't make it. Not after all they did for you, even if they did nothing but die, and unwillingly, and not for you.

You shouldn't do that," said Laura. "You could set yourself on fire.

We yearned for the future. How did we learn it, that talent for insatiability?

...we must be a beacon of hope, because if you tell people there's nothing they can do, they will do worse than nothing.

Fatigue is here, in my body, in my legs and eyes. That is what gets you in the end. Faith is only a word, embroidered.

Religious people of any serious kind made her nervous: they were like men in raincoats who might or might not be flashers.

A word after a word after a word is power.

Perhaps I write for no one. Perhaps for the same person children are writing for when they scrawl their names in the snow.

Good writing takes place at intersections, at what you might call knots, at places where the society is snarled or knotted up.

Better not to invent her in her absence. Better to wait until she's actually here. Then he can make her up as she goes along.

[L]ife isn't run by principles but by adjustments.

Time: old cold time, old sorrow, settling down in layers like silt in a pond.

Fear is a powerful stimulant.

Knowing was a temptation. What you don't know won't tempt you.

Maybe I don't really want to know what's going on. Maybe I'd rather not know. Maybe I couldn't bear to know. The Fall was a fall from innocence to knowledge.