What would it have meant to be happy? What would it have meant if things had been bright, clear, good between us?

There is no sense in loving someone you can never wake up to except by chance.

I don't want to conquer you; I just want to climb you.

I had lines inside me, a string of guiding lights. I had language. Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination. I had been damaged, and a very important part of me had been destroyed - that was my reality, the facts of my life. But on the other side of the facts was who I could be, how I could feel. And as long as I had words for that, images for that, stories for that, then I wasn't lost.

The fact is that every atom that we're made of is part of that first explosion of a nuclear star billions of years ago. We're connected to the entire universe.

I think we still believe that ambition is for boys.

What is more humiliating than finding the object of your love unworthy?