All the same, my depression and self-hatred, my desire to mutilate myself with broken bottles, my numbness and crying fits, my inability to get out of bed for days and days, the feeling of the world moving in to crush me, went on and on. But I knew I wouldn't go mad, even if that release, that letting-go, was a freedom I desired. I was waiting for myself to heal.

Falling in love was simple; one had only to yield. Digesting another person, however, and sustaining love, was bloody work, and not a soft job.

The vocation of each writer is to describe the world as he or she sees it; anything more than that is advertising.

What a quality of innocence people have when they don't expect to be harmed.

I don't want to be loved. I want to be desired. Love is safety, but desire is foul.

Dear God, teach me to be careless.

My father was a civil servant, so having a regular job, being respectable is a big deal for me. Respectable in the sense that I support my family. That's what I mean by respectability.