He walked out of the hospital into the sun, into open air for the first time in months, out of the green-lit rooms that lay like glass in his mind. He stood there breathing everything in, the hurry of everyone. First, he thought, I need shoes with rubber on the bottom. I need gelato.

I want to die on your chest but not yet she wrote sometime in the 13th century of our love

This was the time in her life that she fell upon books as the only door out of her cell. They became half her world.

Githa Hariharan's fiction is wonderful-full of subtleties and humor and tenderness.

You can see that the care he took defiling the beauty he had forced in them was as precise and clean as his good hands which at night had developed the negatives, floating the sheets in the correct acids and watching the faces and breasts and pubic triangles and sofas emerge. The making and destroying coming from the same source, same lust, same surgery his brain was capable of. (On New Orleans photographer E. J. Bellocq)

We keep wanting to save those who are forlorn in this world. It’s a male habit.

We are expanded by tears, we are told, not reduced by them.