They seemed to have taken all of their smoothly cultivated ignorance, their exquisitely learned self-hatred, their elaborately designed hopelessness and sucked it all up into a fiery cone of scorn that had burned for ages in the hollows of their minds― cooled ―and spilled over lips of outrage, consuming whatever was in its path.

When they fall in love with a city, it is for forever and it is like forever.

Nobody loved her and she wouldn’t have liked it if they had, she considered love a serious disability.

I don't think I knew any of my father's friends - male friends - by their real names. I remember them only by their nicknames.

Anger is better. There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of worth. It is a lovely surging.

The pieces I am, she gather them and gave them back to me in all the right order.

Life that crawled, life that slunk and crept and never closed its eyes. Life that burrowed and scurried, and life so still it was indistinguishable from the ivy stems on which it lay. Birth, life, and death - each took place on the hidden side of a leaf.