I am myself. That is not enough.

I think if I had done anything else I would like to have been a doctor. This is the sort of polar opposition to being a writer, I suppose.

The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence.

Piece by piece, I fed my wardrobe to the night wind, and flutteringly, like a loved one’s ashes, the gray scraps were ferried off, to settle here, there, exactly where I would never know, in the dark heart of New York.

Slowly, slowly, catch the monkey.

Then I thought, "No, I broke it myself. I broke it on purpose to pay myself back for being such a heel.

Doreen had intuition. Everything she said was like a secret voice speaking straight out of my own bones.