Every painting is always two paintings: The one you see, and the one you remember.

Great books are the ones that are urgent, life-changing, the ones that crack open the reader’s skull and heart.

I remember thinking how easy it is to speak in clichés, to steal a line from pulp fiction and let it fall. We can only hover around the inexpressible with our words anyway, and there is comfort in saying what we have heard before.

under our love making I felt a bleakness that couldnt be dispelled. The sadness was in both of us, and I think we pitied ourselves that night, as if we were other people looking down on the couple who lay together on the bed

There's a phenomenology of being sick, one that depends on temperament, personal history, and the culture which we live in.

I think because mothers usually are the people who take care of us when we're little, and when we're little those mothers are omnipotent, perhaps men even more than women don't like to think about that dependency. That dependency is horror.

We read each other through our eyes, and anatomically they are an extension of our brains. When we catch someone's eye, we look into a mind.