A lie was something that hadn't happened but might just as well have.

So often I heard people paying blind obeisance to change - as though it had some virtue of its own. Change or we will die. Change or we will stagnate. Evergreens don't stagnate.

He always said she was smart, but their conversations were a mined field in which at any moment she might make the wrong verbal move and find her ignorance exploding in her face.

It takes far less courage to kill yourself than it takes to wake up one more time. It is harder to stay where you are than to get out.

What interests me, ... is why people are so repelled when, after all, everyone started life attached. In a sense, the twins have never been born because they are still tied by an umbilical cord. Relationships between women - daughters, mothers, friends - are one of my strong interests.

Some people spend their lives failing and never notice.

Identity is a bag and a gag. Yet it exists for me with all the force of a fatal disease. Obviously I am here, a mind and a body. To say there's no proof my body exists would be arty and specious and if my mind is more ephemeral, less provable, the solution of being a writer with solid (touchable, tearable, burnable) books is as close as anyone has come to a perfect answer.