Here's to another year and let's hope it's above ground.

It's the arrangement of events which makes the stories. It's throwing away, compressing, underlining. Hindsight can give structure to anything, but you have to be able to see it. Breathing, waking and sleeping: our lives are steamed and shaped into stories. Knowing that is what keeps me from going insane, and though I don't like to admit it, sometimes it's the only thing.

In one day I had altered my life; my life, therefore, was alterable. This simple axiom did not call out for exegesis; no, it entered my bloodstream directly, as powerful as heroin. I could feel it pump and surge, the way it brightened my veins to a kind of glass. I had wakened that morning to narrowness and predestination and now I was falling asleep in the storm of my own free will.

There are chapters in every life which are seldom read and certainly not aloud.

The scolding voice is her own, so abrasive and quick, yet so powerless to move her.

A childhood is what anyone wants to remember of it. It leaves behind no fossils, except perhaps in fiction.

We are too kind, too willing--too unwilling too--reaching out blindly with a grasping hand but not knowing how to ask for what we don't even know we want.