People think they know the mystery of living in your skin. They don't. There's no one who knows except the person who carts it around her own self.

The Irish are great for their tunes, but all their lovesongs are sad and their warsongs happy.

Sometimes we just walk into something that is not for us at all. We pretend it is. We think we can shrug it off like a coat, but it's not a coat at all, it's more like another skin. [...] All I wanted was to make my life thrilling for a while: to take the oridinary objects of my days and make a different argument out of them, no obligations to my past.

One of those out-of-the-ordinary days that made sense of the slew of ordinary days. New York had a way of doing that. Every now and then the city shook its soul out. It assailed you with an image, or a day, or a crime, or a terror, or a beauty so difficult to wrap your mind around that you had to shake your head in disbelief.

I grew up sort of middle class, safe and suburban.

This is not my life. These are not my cobwebs. This is not the darkness I was designed for.

Everything was fabulous, even our breakdowns.