“We yearned for the future. How did we learn it, that talent for insatiability?”

“Maybe the life I think I'm living is a paranoid delusion...Sanity is a valuable possession; I hoard it the way people once hoarded money. I save it, so I will have enough, when the time comes.”

“Happiness is a garden walled with glass: there's no way in or out. In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys. It's loss and regret and misery and yearning that drive the story forward, along its twisted road.”

“Knowing was a temptation. What you don't know won't tempt you.”

“All you have to do, I tell myself, is keep your mouth shut and look stupid. It shouldn't be that hard.”

“I knew what love was supposed to be: obsession with undertones of nausea. ”

“You can't help what you feel, but you can help how you behave”

“It's impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was, because of what you say can never be exact, you always have to leave something out, there are too many parts, sides, crosscurrents, nuances; too many gestures, which could mean this or that, too many shapes which can never be fully described, too many flavors, in the air or on the tongue, half-colors, too many.”

“I feel like the word shatter.”

“What am I living for and what am I dying for are the same question.”

“I want to be held and told my name. I want to be valued, in ways that I am not; I want to be more than valuable. I repeat my former name; remind myself of what I once could do, how others saw me. I want to steal something.”

“If he wants to be an asshole, it's a free country. Millions before him have made the same life choice.”

“But some people can't tell where it hurts. They can't calm down. They can't ever stop howling.”

“All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel.

“You can think clearly only with your clothes on.”

“Gone mad is what they say, and sometimes Run mad, as if mad is a different direction, like west; as if mad is a different house you could step into, or a separate country entirely. But when you go mad you don't go any other place, you stay where you are. And somebody else comes in.”

“How could I be sleeping with this particular man.... Surely only true love could justify my lack of taste.”

“Women have curious ways of hurting someone else. They hurt themselves instead; or else they do it so the guy doesn't even know he's been hurt until much later. Then he finds out. Then his dick falls off.”

“We thought we had such problems. How were we to know we were happy?”

“And she finds it difficult to believe—that a person would love her even when she isn't trying. Trying to figure out what other people need, trying to be worthy.”

“If we were all on trial for our thoughts, we would all be hanged.”

“The best way of keeping a secret is to pretend there isn't one.”

“Stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results.”

“Perhaps I write for no one. Perhaps for the same person children are writing for when they scrawl their names in the snow.”