He reminded me of someone who put your fingers in the door and smiled and talked to you while he smashed them.

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

Don't hoard the past. Don't cherish anything. Burn it. The artist is the phoenix who burns to emerge.

She kissed me on the mouth. Her mouth tasted like iced coffee and cardamom, and I was overwhelmed by the taste, her hot skin and the smell of unwashed hair. I was confused, but not unwilling. I would have let her do anything to me.

When you're a little kid, you are small, your life is small - and you're terrifically aware of that. But when you read, you can ride Arabian horses across the desert, you can be a dogsledder.

Now I wish she'd never broken any of her rules. I understood why she held to them so hard. Once you broke the first one, they all broke, one by one, like firecrackers exploding in your face in a parking lot on the Fourth of July.

It's not that he was going nowhere, it's that he'd already arrived.