Time is compressed like the fist I close on my knee... I hold inside it the clues and solutions and the power for what I must do now.

You meet the same people on the way down that you meet on the way up, but you're going the other way.

I was kidnapped by literature at a young age and never wanted to be ransomed.

Paper isn’t important. It’s the words on them that are important.

Well. Then we had the irises, rising beautiful and cool on their tall stalks, like blown glass, like pastel water momentarily frozen in a splash, light blue, light mauve, and the darker ones, velvet and purple, black cat's ears in the sun, indigo shadow, and the bleeding hearts, so female in shape it was a surprise they'd not long since been rooted out. There is something subversive about this garden of Serena's, a sense of buried things bursting upwards, wordlessly, into the light, as if to point, to say: Whatever is silenced will clamor to be heard, though silently.

I always thought eating was a ridiculous activity anyway. I'd get out of it myself if I could, though you've got to do it to stay alive, they tell me.

No one knows what cuases an outer landscape to become an inner one.