Getting away from being 'a good girl' is important because it's impossible to be a 'good girl' and a writer at the same time.

I have managed not to finish certain books. With barely a twinge of conscience, I hurl down what bores me or doesn't give what I crave: ecstasy, transcendence, a thrill of mysterious connection. For, more than anything else, readers are thrill-seekers, though I don't read thrillers, not the kind sold under that label, anyway. They don't thrill; only language thrills.

Getting away from being 'a good girl' is important because it's impossible to be a 'good girl' and a writer at the same time.

Nothing is as horrendous as imagining the times of happiness from an environment which is that of hell.

Head held high and lips parted, she breathed in the music, sending it through her torso and arms and legs the way the Tai Chi teacher told us to breath the air, transforming it into energy, motion. Dancing is the body's song, and Bess sang.

The stillness and stasis of bed are the perfect opposite of travel: inertia is what I've come to consider the default mode, existentially and electronically speaking. Bed, its utter inactivity, offers a glimpse of eternity, without the drawback of being dead.

I have done what people do, my life makes a reasonable showing. Can I go back to my books now?