When you quit drinking you stop waiting.

It happened this way: I fell in love and then, because the love was ruining everything I cared about, I had to fall out.

I've always been drawn to solitude, felt a kind of luxurious relief in its self-generated pace and rhythms.

When you're starving or wrapped up in a cycle of binge-ing-and-purging, or sexually obsessed with (someone), it is very hard to think about anything else, very hard to see the larger picture of options that is your life, very hard to consider what else you might need or want or fear were you not so intently focused on one crushing passion. I sat in my room every night, with rare exceptions, for three and a half years.

Dogs have such short life spans, it's like a concentrated version of a human life. When they get older, they become much more like our mothers. They wait for us, watch out for us, are completely fascinated by everything we do.

For years, I ate the same foods every day, in exactly the same manner, at exactly the same times.

Smooth and ordered on the outside; roiling and chaotic and desperately secretive underneath, but not noticeably so, never noticeably so.