That was what gospel was meant to do - make you hate and love yourself at the same time, make you ashamed and glorified.

I did not begin with craft, I began with strong feelings and worked toward craft.

I am the only one who can tell the story of my life and say what it means.

Behind my carefully buttoned collar is my nakedness, the struggle to find clean clothes, food, meaning, and money. Behind sex is rage, behind anger is love, behind this moment is silence, years of silence.

I wanted to start over completely, to begin again as new people with nothing of the past left over. I wanted to run away from who we had been seen to be, who we had been... It's the first thing I think of when trouble comes - the geographic solution. Change your name, leave town, disappear, make yourself over. What hides behind that impulse is the conviction that the life you have lived, the person you are, is valueless, better off abandoned, that running away is easier than trying to change things, that change itself is not possible.

Beauty, my first girlfriend said to me, is that inner quality often associated with great amounts of leisure time.

Twenty years after we had left so fierce and proud, we were all right back where we had started, yoked to each other and the same old drama.