Your numbness is something perhaps you cannot help. It is what the world has done to you. But your coldness. That is what you do to the world.

The problem with a beautiful woman is that she makes everyone around her feel hopelessly masculine, which if you’re already male to begin with poses no particular problem. But if you’re anyone else, your whole sexual identity gets dragged into the principal’s office: “So what’s this I hear about you prancing around, masquerading as a woman?” You are answerless. You are sitting on your hands. You are praying for your breasts to grow, your hair to perk up.

Writers have no real area of expertise. They are merely generalists with a highly inflamed sense of punctuation.

Her life her life had taken on the shape of a terrible mistake. She hadn't been given the proper tools to make a real life with, she decided, that was it. She'd been given a can of gravy and a hair-brush and told, "There you go." She'd stood there for years, blinking and befuddled, brushing the can with the brush.

The affectionate farce I make of him ignores the ways I feel his lack of love for me. But we are managing.

You chose love like a belief, a faith, a place, a box for one's heart to knock against like a spook in the house.

This was love, I supposed, and eventually I would come to know it. Someday it would choose me and I would come to know its spell, for long stretches and short, two times, maybe three, and then quite probably it would choose me never again.