You write a book and you hope somebody will go out and pay $24.95 for what you've just said. I think books were my salvation. Books saved me from being miserable.

Language is the tool of my trade -and I use them all - all the Englishes I grew up with

And I remember wondering why it was that eating something good could make me feel so terrible, while vomiting something terrible could make me feel so good.

I did not lose myself all at once. I rubbed out my face over the years washing away my pain, the same way carvings on stone are worn down by water.

It was a distorted form of inverse logic: If hopes never come true, then hope for what you don't want.

I think Kwan intended to show me the world is not a place but the vastness of the sou. And the soul is nothing more than love, limitless, endless, all that moves us toward knowing what is true....If people we love die, then they are lost only to our ordinary senses. If we remember, we can find them anytime with our hundred secret senses.

Ying-ying, you have tiger eyes. They gather fire in the day. At night they shine golden.