Adolescents believe that the world belongs to the living, or more particularly to living people their age, so they feel within their rights if they destroy the canon or rewrite the fairy stories or act like Red Guards.

My life failed on the very day I was born.

Hierarchy, as in the Catholic Church, has to do with power, and vertical attention has to do with longing.

The candle is not lit To give light, but to testify to the night.

Those of us who make up poems have agreed not to say what the pain is.

Siblings tend not to care much about boundaries and borders. Having worn each others' T-shirts, it's unlikely that they'd go to war over a border.

I saw Sophia Loren - the Italian woman with those wonderful cheekbones - in a movie the other day. She must have had 24 face-lifts, and she looks like an alien, as if she weren't from this world at all. Her Italian wrinkles would have been a thousand times more beautiful.