The life you live in front of an audience is like an altered state - it's not totally real. I'm always, even in the course of one day, trying to find ways to balance both sides.

He breathed out the bitter air that makes women doubt everything, and I breathed it in, as I had always done. I expelled my dust, the powder of everything I had destroyed with doubt, and he pulled it into his lungs.

Things usually make sense in time, and even bad decisions have their own kind of correctness.

It was a real whale, a photograph of a real whale. I looked into its tiny wise eye and wondered where that eye was now. Was it alive and swimming, or had it died long ago, or was it dying now, right this second? When a whale dies, it falls down through the ocean slowly, over the course of a day. All the other fish see it fall, like a giant statue, like a building, but slowly, slowly.

I moved his hair out of his face. I put my hand under his nose and felt gentle, even breaths. I pressed my lips against his ear and whispered again, It’s not your fault. Perhaps this was really the only thing I had ever wanted to say to anyone, and be told.

A more normal, mature way to think about it [my work] would be, Oh, I work on multiple projects at once and they overlap, but the actual psychology of it is a lot more self-abusing.

I think it's more interesting if you go all the way with the world you have, and really look at it, and push it to an even more extreme extreme.