When I am lonely for boys it’s their bodies I miss. I study their hands lifting the cigarettes in the darkness of the movie theaters, the slope of a shoulder, the angle of a hip. Looking at them sideways, I examine them in different lights. My love for them is visual: that is the part of them I would like to possess. Don’t move, I think. Stay like that, let me have that.

Some bioengineering is good, especially if it results in plants that are more drought-resistant or perennial food crops.

You may not be able to alter reality, but you can alter your attitude towards it, and this, paradoxically, alters reality. Try it and see.

She had no images of this love. She could offer no anecdotes. It was a belief rather than a memory.

Time rises and rises, and when it reaches the level of your eyes you drown.

So much for endings. Beginnings are always more fun. True connoisseurs, however, are known to favor the stretch in between, since it's the hardest to do anything with. That's about all that can be said for plots, which anyway are just one thing after another, a what and a what and a what.

You're never going to kill storytelling, because it's built into the human plan. We come with it.