When I was a girl, my life was music that was always getting louder. Everything moved me. A dog following a stranger. That made me feel so much.

(What are your ghosts like?) (They are on the insides of the lids of my eyes.) (This is also where my ghosts reside.) (You have ghosts?) (Of course I have ghosts.) (But you are a child.) (I am not a child.) (But you have not known love.) (These are my ghosts, the spaces amid love.)

I do think ordinariness is, in a way, the enemy, but not ordinariness as the opposite of flamboyance.

I didn't feel empty. I wished I'd felt empty. ... I wanted to be empty like an overturned pitcher. But I was full like a stone.

Words never mean what we want them to mean.

Food for her is not food, it is terror, dignity, gratitude, vengeance, joyfulness, humiliation, religion, history, and, of course, love. As if the fruit she always offered us were picked from the destroyed brances of out family tree.

They do not desire anything more than everything they have known.