“I was the one with the open wound, and the river waters turned red when I bathed in them. My sadness is greater than the heavens.”

“In the fall of the year I turned sixteen, I jumped out of my bedroom window and ran away. The night’s black roads wound like long stretches of river. … The streets ribboned out in all directions. I lifted first one foot and then the other, ready to run down all of them”

“I wish for my child to have a mind as stark and wild as the winter, a spirit as clear and fine as my window, and a heart as red and open as my wounded hand.”

“When they asked some old Roman philosopher or other how he wanted to die, he said he would open his veins in a warm bath. I thought it would be easy, lying in the tup and seeing the redness flower from my wrists, flush after flush through the clear water, till I sank into sleep under a surface gaudy as poppies.”

“When I dance with him,one of my great loves, he is absolutely human,and when he turns to dip meor I step on his foot because we are both leading,I know that one of us will die first and the other will suffer.The slow dance of what’s to comeand the slow dance of insomniapouring across the floor like bath water.”

“An idea is a greater monument than a cathedral. And the advance of man's knowledge is a greater miracle than all the sticks turned to snakes or the parting of the waters.”