He hated crowds, never liked punk. He couldn't handle the nakedness of the rage -his own so sophisticated and finely tuned. He could never see the similarity between himself and Donnie Draino screaming into a mic.

Whenever she thought she could not feel more alone, the universe peeled back another layer of darkness.

I was always mortified.Didn't they know they were tying thier mothers to the ground? Weren't chains ashamed of their prisoners?

And I thought, there was no God, there was only what you wanted.

What is real is always worth it.

Nobody had forgotten anything here. In Berlin, you had to wrestle with the past, you had to build on the ruins, inside them. It wasn't like America where we scraped the earth clean, thinking we could start again every time.

I took the volume to a table, opened its soft, ivory pages... and fell into it as into a pool during dry season.