If I could have him like this in my dreams every night of my life, I'd stake my entire life on dreams and be done with the rest.

My love stories are about people who are reluctant to actualize what they so desperately want. They are timid, cautious, but eventually they dare to speak. My characters are not only hesitant; they are ambivalent about which way their libido flows: toward men or women? They are fluid in their sexuality, and this ambivalence says more about how we think about sex today than, say, Tinder. And this is a truly modern idea: Most of us don't know who we are sexually.

I suddenly realized that we were on borrowed time, that time is always borrowed, and that the lending agency exacts its premium precisely when we are least prepared to pay and need to borrow more.

Perhaps we were friends first and lovers second. But then perhaps this is what lovers are.

If I could have him like this in my dreams every night of my life, I'd stake my entire life on dreams and be done with the rest.

Most of us can't help but live as though we've got two lives to live, one is the mockup, the other the finished version, and then there are all those versions in between. But there's only one, and before you know it, your heart is worn out, and, as for your body, there comes a point when no one looks at it, much less wants to come near it. Right now there's sorrow. I don't envy the pain. But I envy you the pain. (p. 225)

As we walked, I began to wonder what the opposite of molting was and why, unlike the body, which sheds everything, the soul cannot let go but compiles and accumulates, growing annual rings around the things it wants and dreams and remembers