This was the life I was going to be living, everybody separated from everybody else, hanging on for a moment only to be washed away.

I took my mother's knife and played johnny johnny johnny on the playhouse floor. I was drunk, stabbed myself every few throws. I held my hand up and there was satisfaction at seeing my blood, the way there was when I saw the red gouges onmy face that people stared at and turned away. They were thinking I was beautiful, but they were wrong, now they could see how ugly and mutilated I was.

I almost said, you're not broken, you're just going through something. But i couldn't. She knew. There was something terribly wrong with her, all the way inside. She was like a big diamond with a dead spot in the middle. I was supposed to breathe life into that dead spot, but it hadn't worked.

I hated labels anyway. People didn't fit in slots--prostitute, housewife, saint--like sorting the mail. We were so mutable, fluid with fear and desire, ideals and angles, changeable as water.

A womans mistakes are different from a girls

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

Reading LOVE JUNKIE is like watching a sleepwalker taking a stroll on a freeway. All you can do is pray. Gorgeously written, piercingly honest.