The best you'll ever do is to understand yourself, know what it is that you want, and not let the cattle stand in your way.

That was the thing about words, they were clear and specific-chair, eye, stone- but when you talked about feelings, words were too stiff, they were this and not that, they couldn't include all the meanings. In defining, they always left something out.

As an artist, you can never get what you want. What you do never approaches what you want it to be.

They dream of men with gentle hands, eloquent with tenderness, fingers that brushed along a cheek, that outlined open lips in the lovers' braille. Hands that sculpted sweetness from sullen flesh, that traced breast and ignited hips, opening, kneading. Flesh becomes bread in the heat of those hands, braided and rising.

This is what happens when you fall in love. You're looking at a natural disaster.

Beauty was deceptive. I would rather wear my pain, my ugliness. I was torn and stitched. I was a strip mine, and they would just have to look. I hoped I made them sick. I hoped they saw me in their dreams.

she’s not as pretty as you,” I said “But she’s a simpler girl,” my mother whispered.