There are ways of being abandoned even when your parents are right there.

By writing I can live in ways that I could not survive.

I got well by talking. Death could not get a word in edgewise, grew discouraged, and traveled on.

Sometimes a person's monstrosity seems superhuman.

If only I had discipline, but alas, it is only an obsessive-compulsive trait and the beauty of habit that causes me to return again and again to my work.

Her clothes were filled with safety pins and hidden tears.

At times the whole sky was ringed in shooting points and puckers of light gathering and falling, pulsing, fading, rhythmical as breathing. All of a piece. As if the sky were a pattern of nerves and our thought and memories traveled across it. As if the sky were one gigantic memory for us all.