One of the reasons that art is important to me is sometimes it actually feels more coherent than life. It orders the chaos.

Chunks of his life fell away, so that while we were moving ahead in time, he was moving back.

The girls took into their own hands decisions better left to God. They became too powerful to live among us, too self-concerned, too visionary, too blind.

If you talk to geneticists they are constantly finding that your genes are being switched on and off because of the environment. Genes alone do not determine an exact path in your life.

Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness", "joy", or "regret". Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that is oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions.

Whenever we got a glimpse, their faces looked indecently revealed, as though we were used to seeing women in veils.

Household objects lost meaning. A bedside clock became a hunk of molded plastic, telling something called time, in a world marking it's passage for some reason.