“It is not the job of writers to life our spirits. Books simply do what they do. They sometimes confirm the capricious drama of a childhood living room. When you think that you are in the grace of a dance you come upon something hard.”

“dance floors would bleed from the knife of her dress”

“And on the sidewalks, after they've emerged from the stations, after being sandpapered by the jostling and scraping that a city like this does, all the lives they've hoarded, all the ghosts they've carried, all the inversions they've made for protection, all the scars and marks and records for recognition - the whole heterogeneous baggage falls out with each step on the pavement. There's so much spillage.”

“They were born in the city from people born elsewhere.”

“..would I have had a different lifefailing this embrace with broken things,iridescent veins, ecstatic bullets, small cracksin the brain, would I know these particular facts,how a phrase scars a cheek, how waterdries love out, this, a thought as casualas any second eviscerates a breath.”

“a boat, even a wrecked and wretched boatstill has all the possibilities of moving”

“She could assassinate streets with her eyes”