I get absolutely shitfaced. I am shitfaced and hyper and ten years old. I am having the time of my life.

Hatred is so much closer to love than indifference.

The biggest fear of my life is living. My second biggest fear is dying.

You will miss her sometimes. Bear in mind she's trying to kill you. Bear in mind you have a life to live.

We turn skeletons into goddesses and look to them as if they might teach us how not to need.

One really ought to be afraid of self-torture. But it tempted me. It begged. The dark place that my mind was fast becoming blends, in my memory, with the dark womb of church: the chant, the fugue of prayer, the strange erotic energy that carving a very small cross into my thigh with a nail had brought.

And it's California, where everything is powerfully strange. Everyone wants it to be home. Everyone left where he or she was from with dreams of transformation. Everyone runs away to California at least once, or at least all the lonely, hungry people do.