“My radar, after all these years of sanity, is still off when it comes to what people do or don't mean.”

“What people don't understand when you've already been a suicide and pulled through is that after the sadness comes fear: Where is my mind going with this? I don't want to die. I do not want to die. When you don't have so much control over your own thoughts, over the myriad voices in your head, you don't know where they could go.”

“When I come to the end of my life ― when I come to the real end, at the right time, my mind may flash with random images... But I am not being hopeful about this when I say my last thoughts will be of love.”

“People don't know. We don't know ourselves so we tell ourselves what we really know is other people. We could say the depth of pain we feel for the lovers who've left us is because we knew them so well.”

“When I come home from school, I take my Doc Martens off and put on fake satin mules with the marabou trim, slip into my dressing gown and my movie, and I feel serene. I hold a glass of Coke to my cheek and pretend it is a glass of bourbon and I am in New Orleans. My bedroom door is the doorway onto the street and at night I can't sleep because of the heat and the commotion in this town. So I go down to the river and dance as a man with scars on his face plays an accordion. People clap along and wolf-whistle and I whip my skirt around my thighs, which are long and lean because I barely get a chance to eat, what with all my bourbon and afternoon baths. I dance until my mules get muddy, then I tiptoe home, followed by sailors and men who have hundreds and thousands of dollars playing stud poker. Steve McQueen might be there. I can't remember. I get confused at this point. Too much drink. I'm sure Karl Malden is lurking in the background, gazing at me longingly. I am kind to him because his mother is dying. ”

“Men and the pursuit of them are strongly intertwined with my mental health. I would say, in my defensive defense, that the problem with being a serial monogamist is, there isn't anybody random or unimportant: everybody you sleep with really means something, which is to say each of them is on your public record. At some point I wake up thinking, Fuck this! I don't want another man in my bed ever again. What I really want is a cat.”

“We all perform. It's what we do for each other all the time, deliberately or unintentionally. It's a way of telling about ourselves in the hope of being recognized as what we'd like to be.”