When you are in the middle of a story it isn't a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It's only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else.

We shouldn't have been so scornful; we should have had compassion. But compassion takes work, and we were young.

Can I be blamed for wanting a real body, to put my arms around? Without it I too am disembodied. I can listen to my own heartbeat against the bedsprings...but there’s something dead about it, something deserted.

The Eskimos had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them: there ought to be as many for love.

I tend to feel if people say they're going to do something, they will, if given the chance.

Now that I am dead, I know everything.

A prison does not only lock its inmates inside, it keeps all others out. Her strongest prison is of her own construction.