“The story the body lives in is crazythere is no end to it but change.”

“Your enemies call it comeuppanceand relish the detailsof a drug too fine, how longyou must have dangled there beside yourself.In the middle distance of yourtwenty-ninth year, night split openlike a fighter's bruised palm,a purple ripeness.Friends shook their heads.With you it was alwaysthe next attractive trouble,as if an arranged marriage had been madein a country of wing walkers, lion tamers,choirboys leaping from bellpullsinto the high numb glitter, and you,born with the breath of wild on your tonguebrash as gin.True, it was charming for a while.Your devil's balance, your debts.Then no one was laughing.Hypodermic needles and cash registersemptied themselves in your presence.Cars went head-on.Sympathy, old motor, ran outor we grew old, our tongueswearing little grooves in our mouthsclucking disappointment.Michael, what pulled you upby upstart rootsand set you packing,left the rest of us here, body-heavyon the edge of our pews.Over the reverend's lamentwe could still hear laughter, your mustachethe angled black wingsof a perfect crow. Laterwe taught ourselves the proper method for mourninghaphazard life: salt, tequila, lemon.Drinking and driftingin your honor we barely felt a thing.”

“A cross is a poor shade tree in earthquake weather.”

“Ducking for apples -- change one letter and it's the story of my life.”

“For to Ade,...the holy man was the whole mad, the man of integrity, who not only tried to change the world, but to live in it as it was.”

“It was a story to tell myself, a promise. Saying out loud, "You're never going to touch me again" - that was a piece of magic, magic in the belly, the domed kingdom of sex, the terror place inside where rage and power live. Whiskey rush without whiskey, bravado and determination, this place where for the first time I knew no confusion, only outrage and pride. In the worst moments of my life, I have told myself that story, the story about a girl who stood up to a monster. Doing that, I make a piece of magic inside myself, magic to use against the meanness of the world.”

“I did not imagine anyone reading my rambling, ranting stories. I was writing for myself, trying to shape my life outside my terrors and helplessness, to make it visible and real in a tangible way, in the way other people's seemed real -- the lives I had read about in books.”