The contents of a house can trigger all sorts of revisions to family history.

I feel myself becoming less a person than a place, inhabited, a foreign land.

We have these earthly bodies. We don't know what they want. Half the time, we pretend they are under our mental thumb, but that is the illusion of the healthy and the protected. Of sedate lovers. For the body has emotions it conceives and carries through without concern for anyone or anything else. Love is one of those, I guess. Going back to something very old knit into the brain as we were growing. Hopeless. Scorching. Ordinary.

There is no such thing as a complete lack of order, only a design so vast it appears unrepetitive up close.

It kills your writing if you try to manipulate it with crude politics.

I think she is confused by the way I want her, which is like nobody else. I know this deep down. I want her in a new way, a way she's never been told about.

To be of mixed blood is a great gift for a writer. I have one foot on tribal lands and one foot in middle-class life.