[On her mother:] My relationship with her is close, painful, and skaky, and I always have to keep searching for a sign of love. Everything I do, I do to please her, to make her smile, to ward off her fury. This work is extremely exhausting.

Childhood is long and narrow like a coffin, and you can't get out of it on your own.

my childhood grew thin and flat, paperlike. It was tired and threadbare, and in low moments it didn't look like it would last until I was grown up.

Memory, that library of the soul from which I will draw knowledge and experience for the rest of my life.

Down in the bottom of my childhood my father stands laughing.

my poems covered the bare places in my childhood like the fine, new skin under a scab that hasn't yet fallen off completely.

[On her mother:] My relationship with her is close, painful, and skaky, and I always have to keep searching for a sign of love. Everything I do, I do to please her, to make her smile, to ward off her fury. This work is extremely exhausting.