The nearest I'd come to feeling anything like God was the plan blue cloudless sky and a certain silence, but how do you pray to that?

If this was a sandalwood pyre she would have thrown herself in and this paper she'd become would have caught fire and she and him could sail away like two birds.

Don't turn over the rocks if you don't want to see the pale creatures who live under them.

If I get ideas independently of the act of writing, they never really fit. So for me, there's no hanging out, waiting for inspiration.

For she is my love, and other women are but big bodies of flame.

Once you get below the floor of our personal identities, we're all connected. Perhaps that's why we can move into others' lives.

She was a beautiful woman dragging a crippled foot and I was that foot. I was bricks sewn into the hem of her clothes, I was a steel dress