As a child I made a pact with my mother. I agreed that we were doomed, that she and I abided together in a cocoon of melancholy.

When you love a woman, you love yourself, and it's terrible really, how it seems perfectly possible to swallow the other. With a man you want to join, you want your ribs to connect like handcuffs. But with a woman if you swallow, she becomes you.

I spent so much time as a child thinking what if I was a robot, what if my mind were somewhere else? As a kid you're in the middle of all that.

I knew people want most what they pretend to hate, that it takes courage to say what you really want.

When you write you have to reside in the unknown for as long as possible.

I knew you could find a certain relief in begging God, it had helped me, but on the other hand, God never answered directly and that was always depressing.

The problem with being a modern woman, I thought, as the front door swung wide, is that you have to pretend to be stronger than you are.