We set down feasts for each other and treated our love with tongues of fire. Our bodies were fields of wonder to us.

It enclosed us in its laceries as we watched the moon spill across the Atlantic like wine from an overturned glass. With the light all around us, we felt secret in that moon-infused water like pearls forming in the soft tissues of oysters.

I was trying to unravel the complicated trigonometry of the radical thought that silence could make up the greatest lie ever told.

My mother raised me to be a writer.

I've never cackled with laughter at a single line I've ever written. None of it has given me pleasure.

I don’t know why it is that I have always been happier thinking of somewhere I have been or wanted to go, than where I am at the time. I find it difficult to be happy in the present.

She was one of those Southerners who knew from an early age that the South could never be more for them than a fragrant prison, administered by a collective of loving but treacherous relatives.