You are my everlasting home. Don't you ever be afraid. I am enough. We are enough.

In a weird way I must have loved my little collection of hurts and wounds. They provided me with some real nice sympathy, with the feeling I was exceptional... What a special case I was.

I grew up in the American South and came of age in the 1960s, an incredibly turbulent time. It was as if the seams of American life were being ripped apart with riots and protests.

You can go other places, all right - you can live on the other side of the world, but you can't ever leave home

From now on when people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I planned to say, Amnesiac.

One day I will have to forgive life for ending, I tell myself. I will have to learn how to let life be life with its unbearable finality ... just be what it is.

It's something everybody wants-for someone to see the hurt done to them and set it down like it matters.